Placeholder copy — this is a stand-in essay in roughly the right voice and length.
There is a moment in every side project where it stops being a thing you are making and becomes a thing you are maintaining. It rarely announces itself. One week you are adding features because they are fun, and the next you are reading a bug report at two in the morning because somebody in another timezone depends on you.
Nobody tells you about the second half
The writing about software is mostly about the first half — the part with the blank editor and the good ideas. The second half is quieter and much longer.
- Rate limits you did not know existed
- Refunds, and the person attached to each one
- A migration you have been not-doing for eight months
- The one feature everybody uses that you added in an afternoon
Software that nobody uses is a hobby. Software that people rely on is a small, ongoing promise. Both are fine. They are just not the same thing.
Making the promise smaller
The trick I keep relearning is to make the promise smaller rather than the system bigger. Fewer moving parts, fewer guarantees, fewer things that must be true at three in the morning.
That is not the same as building less. It is choosing which parts are allowed to be complicated, and being unreasonable about everything else.