Before I dragged her off on our Air Force adventure, my wife studied under an amazing artist in Utah named Joseph Brickey. The first time I met him he talked to us about how art is a way of understanding the unseen, meaning the spritual and the divine. In that sense, the creation of art is in a way selfish and selfless. We as humans create art so that we can understand ourselves, the workings of our souls, and our relation to Diety. We share that art to allow others to use our discoveries to aid their own journeys.
OK, that is a super poetic start to a thought that isn’t about art at all. I like coding, and I like creating software. I have this problematic tendency, though, to try to turn every software project into a business. I wrote a bot that was a simple tool I’d been wanting for years, and started trying to figure out how to make money off of it.
When I started working on TinyHatchet I told my wife that it was OK if I didn’t really push the business aspect. But sure enough, I started my next stop of pilot training and started worrying that I wasn’t more focused on marketing and was stressed that the website looked terrible. (More on that another time.)
But I have to remind myself that I’m not building for others, at least not right now. If someone brought bugs for me to fix, I would absolutely fix them because service fills my cup. If it helps someone solve their own problems, I would be very happy. But I’m not building it for them. And that’s ok.