For me, software development has always been a way to explore, create and delight. That’s probably the reason why I’ve had a relatively hard time getting my portfolio together, I didn’t want it to be another barebones site. I want it to display my personality and at least some degree of mastery of the stack I chose (Also I made the rookie mistake of changing the stack a couple of times and starting from scratch.) Unlike with the Dashboard, I didn’t have the commitments and expectations of my co-workers to guide me to the promised land of just shipping something, but I eventually had the epiphany: “just ship something” means “just ship something”

Like if I accept that a product needs to be delivered, my goals shift massively towards delivering the best possible version of that within those constraints. Solo projects for a portfolio don’t have constraints or acting forces. I have a strong desire to meet my co-workers expectations and even hopefully exceed them, but work means work. If I’m scoping out frameworks, I’m doing so with the intent of being able to tell my supervisor about them at the next meeting. It leads to more accountability and a more workable scope. (It also leads to cut-corners, but I’ll get to that later) In solo dev, it’s easy to struggle with that. You’re free to make changes all you want, look into other things, and you don’t have to explain it. I’m kind of stating the obvious but it’s something that I didn’t fully realize it was happening, even after delivering my first project.

Creative block is so talked about and commonly understood that it’s honestly hard to write about, so I’ll start by stealing a quote. Dan Harmon said “Prove you’re a bad writer.” I learned the hard way, and continue to relearn that people who only make good things never make anything. I wanted a blog attached to my portfolio. So the first text I wrote after writing things to replace the template text was a blog post. And yeah, I feel like a bit of a hack, writing about creative block, and the process of doing. It rattles in my mind constantly. But it also exists. Github is littered with corpses of would-be devs that didn’t make it that far, and it’s worth mentioning until every one of those people finally releases that terrible first project.

Of course, making a project and succeeding as an employed developer are two different things. It’s easy to throw stones at agile… but that’s not going to stop me. The thing about standups and story points is that they’re game-able like anything other yard stick for success. It’s just as beneficial (and sometimes even moreso) to figure out what the easiest way to look busy is and start there.