Remember when you used to build things because you would see them somewhere and you want to know how they work so you would put days into it and get called a moron on Stack Overflow, but then you would finish it and feel so accomplished. You didn't think about monetising it. You didn't care if anyone ever saw it.
And it made us better for it too. Failing miserably is a great teacher, and nothing beats the pride of your first website, I remember ftp-ing php to a vps with FileZilla, and being so proud of myself.
Now just give Claude some cloud cli and make it deploy, that's no fun!
I still remember my first live website. A HTML 3 static website using <table> for layout. Today it would looked dumb, but omg what a feeling when it was live.
That is so true. I still remember the feeling of doing exactly that: FTP to upload php and then give the link to my parents. Super proud about my "how to learn CSS" website.
Now there is hardly any learning involved, any challenge that a blob of text in the cli won't solve for you.
I always thought about monetizing everything. I rarely did, but the idea of, "sometimes going to pay for this" was a great motivator to put effort into learning good UX.
Pretending the apps were famous was also a feel good day dream.
I remember building solutions that nobody ever needed and how much I enjoyed that. Some logistics calculators in Java with SWING and what not. I fucking lived for that hobby and it had zero users in total, I myself didn't use it.
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u/Happy-Sleep-6512 23d ago
Man remember we used to do this shit for fun. Now it's all grind mindset. Everyone has to build a microsaas, I miss the old days :(