I've been meaning to write this post for about two years.
Every time I got close, something got in the way. A client deadline. A bad week. The usual ADHD thing where you spend three hours designing the perfect system for writing blog posts instead of just writing one.
So here it is. Messy, slightly rushed, probably too long.
Why now
My daughter is 18 months old. She doesn't care what I do for work yet, but she will. And when she does, I want to be doing something I'm actually proud of.
I've been a developer for over 12 years. I'm good at it. I've built things that work, for clients who pay me, across industries I don't particularly love. But I've been building towards something else for a while now, and the time to actually commit to it is running out of excuses.
So this is me committing to it. In public.
What "building in public" means for me
It doesn't mean sharing every Slack message and bank statement.
For me it means:
- Writing honestly about what's working and what's not
- Documenting the projects I'm building as I build them
- Talking about the ADHD stuff, because it's real and it affects the work
- Not pretending I have it figured out when I don't
What I'm building
Right now there are three things:
Waddle Nest — a baby monitoring app in React Native. Built because the tools that exist are either too basic or too clinical.
TB3D — my 3D printing side business. Started as a hobby, turned into something with actual customers.
Freelance development — I'm taking on client projects. PHP, React, React Native, full-stack.
The honest bit
I'm not doing this because I hate my work. I'm doing this because I love it, and I want to do it on my own terms.
The ADHD makes the employed dev life genuinely hard sometimes. Going indie doesn't fix any of that, but at least I'm in charge of managing it.
If you want to follow along, I'll be posting on TikTok and YouTube as well as here.
See you on the other side.