The Craft

There’s something unique about creating something from scratch, with nothing but your own vision of what it should be like, with no deadlines, no endless reviews and revisions, setting your own requirements and deciding yourself when it’s done or ready.

Over the past year, I’ve been doing less programming and getting more into the communicative side of business, which I’m really excited about. I’ve been spending my time figuring out sales tactics, discovering ways to do effective marketing and learning about distributing knowledge in a growing team.

Part of that shift was a slight frustration with the types of programming projects I was doing. It was quickly fixing stuff, building new features without having proper time to polish all the details, and generally feeling chased to finish one thing in the shortest time possible and moving on to the next. That feeling of knowing that nothing you deliver is ever really finished (programs break, new bugs are found, layouts don’t look perfect on every device in every situation) can over time really start to bog you down.

Doing less programming during the day (not that much less to be honest, there haven’t been too many days where I didn’t write any code!), did free me up to focus on a few small side projects though, ones where I did get the time to focus on all the small details and all the edge cases.

There is something really freeing about that act of creation, whether it is programming or woodworking or writing. Creating something out of just an idea or a need of your own is an experience that is so truly human, and I think it’s important even for the people that spend all day doing a certain activity to also use that ‘craft’ and skill for your own satisfaction and pleasure.