Handmade: A Community for Self-Rolled Performant Software (2016)

There is a trifecta of the art of code, the art of discipline (engineering), and the art of servicing others (business).

A core challenge is that "success" in the modern day starts with business --> engineering --> art.

Like, you will read countless articles of "sit with your customer" or "customer obsession" or "code first and you will fail", but that is from the perspective that business > engineering > art.

Handmade exists such that art > engineering > business.

I praise it just like I praise a handmade piece of furniture made by a master. However, I have the luxury to appreciate it.

The real struggle is finding a place in life between the spectrum of art and business. The key that I have found is the see the spectrum, appreciate it, and adjust the career to find balance, learn what you can, and move on.

My hope is to retire focusing 75% art and 25% engineering, and not worry about the business side. For instance, I have built a programming language for board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/

The key thing that I am focused on is how I think about success, and my #1 metric is whether or not I enjoy working on it.

> The real struggle is finding a place in life between the spectrum of art and business.

Well said. In my adolescence I was all the way on the "art" side, and as I grew older, at some points I was forced to be all the way on the "business" side, just to survive.

Along the way, there was a break in routine, and I was unemployed for a good part of a year. During that time, I naturally pursued "the art of code", as you put it - creating all kinds of software for fun, with no business goals whatsoever.

It was handcrafted code, patiently and lovingly written, that aimed for simplicity and my own aesthetic. My "production routine" became a more organic creative process. I wrote what I felt like, when I felt like it.

Then, by chance, one of the first open-source libraries I wrote became somewhat popular. It led to a trickle, then a stream of clients. Somehow I had lucked out in finding a niche, where people appreciated my craft.

A decade later, I'm still riding that wave - blessed to have a life with a sensible balance of art and business. Now that I have better financial security, I want to shift the balance back to where I came from, to bring the focus back to "art" - and at the same time, continue to flourish on the business side.

So what you're saying is that it's okay for Windows Modern photo app to take 3 seconds to boot up and show an image on the monitor? And it's okay for the image to be blurry and misplaced in the first couple of frame, then corrected in the next couple of frames. And it's okay that it crashes once in a while too, and it's okay for it to be frames behind when resizing, because all of those things is simply the result of features and layers of abstraction that have some little purpose whatever that purpose might be. And you're okay with your software suffering for it?

To me, it's completely unacceptable and not the userexperience I want to give. Where do you draw the line is the question, but I personally want to provide the best experience possible.

The quality of software these days are extremly bad, buggy, big, and slow. And I'm not okay with it, despite how many reasons there might be. And the reasons for it is usually massive amounts of code, frameworks, and layers up layers upon layers of abstractions.

So you want your software to check updates? Well find a way that doesn't make the start-up time or user-experience suffer for it- otherwise don't implement it. That would be my answer to that. I know standards like that can be hard achive in a business, but those are the goals I want to become better at achiving. And to me, that's what handmade is about; giving me the confidence to build my own systems, making them more responsive, and provide a BETTER user experience. Maybe with less features, yes. But at least the features that are there will be extremly good!