Missing the Point
Lately, I’ve been building things nobody asked for.
For much of the past decade I have been writing software that aimed to solve problems that were – intentionally or otherwise – created by power-seeking people. The programs were a reaction to the top-down enforcement of arbitrary rules that could never be justified when questioned. Thinking through the most successful projects, they all followed a very specific pattern: “the man” says I must do a thing their way, but their way is inefficient, so I will ignore them and do it my way with input from everyone but them. There was always push-back of course, but each new hurdle resulted in creative solutions and workarounds.
However, over the past few years, this has not been the case. There are no external antagonists anymore, just me. As such, when I look at the things I’ve developed over the past six months I can see a lot of technical achievements, but there is nothing to prove anymore. As such, the projects get very close to “completion” and then go idle while I philosophise about the necessity of the work. For six months I’ve attempted to find something of value to offer the world. An online education support site. A curated set of sites that help people find interesting campgrounds, dog parks, or cafes. A dog-specific LLM website that required an investment in a powerful Mac Studio and learning how to train and tweak AI models. A major update to 10Centuries. All but the last one have been released, and none have gained any attention. This makes sense given the way people use the web and my inability to market anything worth a darn, but it does make me wonder if I’m missing something.
Aside from the 10C update, I was trying to create software to solve other people’s problems rather than my own. The 10C update is something I’ve been working on for years to varying degrees with the most recent being an attempt to completely modernise the inner workings of the system, optimising it for the way the web is actually used now. However, while working on the new authoring pages and its optional AI assistant, I have consistently struggled with a question that I cannot answer:
Am I missing the point?
10Centuries was created for a number of reasons, but the primary goal was for me to have a mechanism to publish words online for people to read without spending an exorbitant amount of money on a web server to run the more popular open source blogging platforms of 2010. Things have changed a lot since then, but I continue to insist that I invest hundreds of hours every month into writing software with the goal of improving my soliloquies; these blog posts. Like many people who enjoy writing, I have hundreds – if not thousands – of unfinished posts bitrotting away in directories on my computers. Some of these posts turned out to be too raw or incoherent, which made it impossible to share them with the world. Others were paused mid-sentence because I was called away from the keyboard and could never continue the train of thought. Some are just a handful of questions that were supposed to prompt me to write something of value. The update to 10C was supposed to, amongst other things, allow a person to turn some of these abandoned ideas into publishable pieces through the use of a Large Language Model that would read through the posts, find similarities, suggest some changes, ask some questions, and ultimately help a person publish more while also learning more about the craft of writing.
That is the goal.
So I tell myself.
But am I missing the point?
If I want to write, I should really write. Not code. Not look for solutions that distract me from the act of writing. Does the software stack need to be something that I wrote? That would be nice, but I wonder if it’s necessary. There are a lot of better developers out there who have created tools that can do most of what I need while offering greater flexibility for others who might still use 10C.
Over the past few weeks my sleep patterns have been completely messed up due to a combination of this question, oncoming burnout, and the reality of being unemployed for 100 days. Distraction, depression, and dejection — a familiar trio when meaning feels just out of reach.
The same set of questions rolled through my head while I made dinner today, but a new one caught me by surprise: Do I still want to write? Or is this something I tell myself to justify working on 10C?
Yes, I want to write. The world is awash in words and ideas, yet I believe that we should all write. Not everything needs to be published for others to read, but we should all make time to write if for no other reason than to slow down and deliberately think about the topic. This is one of the simplest ways to make sure that we are making conscious decisions and deliberate conclusions. This is why I do it.
Do I need to write software, though? Does it make sense to do so anymore? That’s a questions for a different day.