How this trap wasted 8 months of my life

You just watched a series on the basics of [insert framework here] and ideas are rushing through your head. I could make this! I could make that! You start building your great idea, not for anyone else, but for you…

I fell for this trap not once, but twice since I left university, now one year ago. It all started way back when I was 14. Codecademy if I remember correctly got me into building my first website. Immediately I made a website for my dad his company and for anything else I could think of. I remembered that after I finished the JavaScript (jQuery) course I wanted to build codecademy itself. If you are young this is good, this motivates you to learn, but as you get older you need to understand this and not do this.

So, when I left university (process management & engineering) with good grades to start learning by doing I found Laravel. Unlimited amount of potential, again a lot of ideas were coming. I started making dashboards for again one of my dad his companies. With the cool features in mind and not the problem I was trying to solve I basically wasted 3 months of coding literally 10+ hours per day. It was not about the problem, but about being able to create that cool feature and starting over again and again to “perfect” it…

I ran out of motivation and found the next cool thing, no-code. Can you guess what happened? It actually went a little different. With my Instagram account I managed to get a following of around 1000 people who where all highly interested customers. I promised an app called The “niche” (the Niche is inland shipping, or binnenvaart in Dutch) app. As if it was going to be the only app every needed in that niche. I ended up with hundreds of screens, I terrible user experience, it was basically all over the place. Why? I was simply focusing again on what cool features I wanted to build and not on any problems!

And only now, after another 5
months I finally recognised this pattern in my life and I am going to do something about it.

I always knew coding wasn’t something I wanted to do for life, I am more of a business/people person, just like everyone in my family (who all run businesses). But the developing kept pulling on me, because I love the creating of new exciting stuff.

I do not want to stop being involved in creating, so that’s why I want to offer to work for free for anyone who needs support in anything related to business and people (teams) to gain more experience in other projects and working with people together again.

Interested? email me d.strijker@icloud.com