On building things for fun

Most of what I build has a point. A roadmap, a metric, a reason it needs to exist. That's the job, and I love the job.

But the projects I remember most fondly are the ones with no point at all.

The case for pointlessness

When something has to succeed, every decision gets filtered through will this work? That's a good filter for shipping a product. It's a terrible filter for learning something new, because the most interesting ideas look bad under it.

A side project with no stakes is the opposite. You can:

1. Use the weird tool you've been curious about.
2. Rewrite the whole thing on a whim because you thought of something cleaner.
3. Abandon it the moment it stops being interesting.

None of those are allowed when money is on the line. All of them are where the fun — and a surprising amount of the actual learning — lives.

This site, for example

This site does nothing. It sells nothing, captures no emails, has no funnel. It exists because I wanted a place that felt like mine and because the building of it was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

That's enough. Not everything needs to be a business.