Putting it all on the line
You know that feeling in your gut that tells you, "this is what we need to do", or "this feels right". It's very subtle, but feels right. You have no proof or guarantees. What you do have in excess is doubts, questions, and whole load of uncertainty. The conditions are no where near favorable. Despite these things, I'm deciding to take a chance and putting it all on the line. Let me explain.
About five months ago, I got let go from my job as a software engineer. I was relieved, because I had been feeling discontent for about six months by then, but I was getting paid, I was comfortable so I carried on. After being let go, my first reaction was to find another job. Understandable. The weird thing was that I kept finding reasons to not take the jobs that I got, even though it would have been the wise thing to do. The truth was, I had fallen out of love with programming. Which is a shame cause I really loved writing code. So I decided to find that love again. The only way I knew how, by building things that I thought were fun.
I started by building an interpreter, it was a lot of fun. I ended up creating a fully functional interpreter which could do math, invoke functions etc. It was a guided process as I used the Interpreter book to help me. But it did help me achieve my goal, the spark was back!
The next obvious thing was to build something with AI, there was so much hype and noise around it that, it seemed like the thing to do. It was okay, but turns out I did not really care much about translating audio and it showed in the code and the product. But, doing things or following an idea that might not seem very great had a huge benefit. It gets you going. That's exactly what it did. As per the plan of launching the product, analytics had to be setup to see if there has been any interest at all. That would help validate the idea. As I was looking at the analytics data, I had a curiosity; "could I build this?" (the analytics app).
It was a genuine curiosity, and I went ahead and built the simplest version of a script that would do what the service I used did. The curiosity took a hold of me, I just kept building it, till it resembled a DIY version of the original app. That was two months ago, I'm still working on it. It has taken a life of it's own. I'm extending analytics, to include data that I think will provide more useful insights. To see how your web app actually works on the end users device. As I'm building things, I'm getting more ideas about how to make analytics more useful. Not just for the marketer but developers, who can get actionable data on their code. Some lofty aspirations, I know.
I wish the challenge was building the app itself, but the real big challenge is that I have about four months, maybe five before I spend all my savings. This brings me to the title of the article. This feels right, my family, some of my friends do not agree with this approach and are quite against it. Some think I am out of my mind. I don't blame them, I cannot explain it to them, why I'm driven to work on this thing that might never amount to anything. Except, with the argument that, this feels right. It feels to me like an opportunity of a lifetime. I'm curious about something and have all my awake hours to work on this. Hence, the title, putting it all on the line. I will be able to live with myself if I know that, I took a chance on me, when I had the opportunity. Maybe let my gut know that, I will listen to it, maybe it will start speaking more louder and clearer. So that I hear it more often.
I've read this quote that said, "Magic happens outside of your comfort zone." I am as far out of my comfort zone as I could be, putting it all on the line. At the risk of sounding crazy, I want to give magic an opportunity to happen. This is the first time I've shared this publicly. So far this had been something I've kept mostly to myself, and shared it only with a few close people. Mostly because, I thought I might be perceived as being crazy. Then I was like, there is a high possibility that there is one person out there who is, or at some point will be a such a pickle. I know how lonely it can feel, maybe you find this and realize that you are not alone in this journey. At the time of writing, I have no proof that this journey will amount to anything, except realizing you have the capacity to do things that you never thought you could. Take the chances that you've only read about in books. You have already won, the moment you decided to take that chance and put it all on the line.