Coding, one thing at a time
After years of struggle, I've found balance in coding. Limiting client projects and prioritising my own ideas has drastically reduced my stress and reignited my passion.
A few years ago, I made the important decision to stop taking on web development projects. I've always had a love-hate relationship with programming because I don't work well under pressure, and I didn't know how to avoid overpromising, especially early in my career.
Anyway, even though I embarked in this decision, it took me several years to pivot my business and enter the consulting industry, as I didn't really have the necessary experience to confidently call myself a "consultant". Even today, having achieved over 80% of my income from non-development projects, I still find it hard to completely drop this offering, and that's for several reasons:
- Sometimes, development projects are extremely easy to complete while delivering a very high profit.
- You can make money by selling maintenance services for relatively low effort;
- At the end of the day, I still like coding.
So, over time, my approach has evolved to the point where I've decided that, yes, I do still code, but no, I don't take on multiple development projects at the same time.
While this may seem obvious to some developers out there (lucky you), it took me a whopping 15 years or so to arrive at this very trivial conclusion. Since making this choice, the situation has improved drastically, with my stress levels dropping significantly.
Programming has always been an all-or-nothing endeavor for me — an industry that I felt I needed to outgrow to reach better opportunities, but there was always something calling me back. Now, I've finally found my peace.
So today, to celebrate this conclusion, I want to take one more step and make myself another promise: I will return to seeing programming as a passion by prioritising my own projects over my clients'. I've built way too much good stuff for others while sacrificing my own ideas and potential sources of recurring revenue. I want to change that and build original, significant platforms that can improve both my life and others' (meaning I'd be the first to use them).
To whoever is reading this: I will keep you up to date on my progress on this blog. It's going to take some time, but I'm confident I can do it!