Do more projects just for the hell of it

The last few days I’ve been working on a few Android projects and it got me thinking about tech as a hobby. I think a lot of people get lost in thinking that any project has the potential to get popular and building things needs to include a “scaling” strategy.

Hey, you never know! Your blog could get popular and have millions of visits per day and then you could monetize and finally quit your job. Think about it, no more stand up meetings or Slack!

The trouble is, this is exactly what the industry wants you to think. You always need more bandwidth or compute or storage or RAM or, or, or.

This is what gets in the way of actually making things. Well, fuck that. Just start doing weird things.

I do all kinds of dumb stuff with tech. I find weird uses for items people think are trash and I do it just for the hell of it. There’s no greater goal or monetization strategy. I just want to do weird experiments for fun.

I’ve created a battery powered emergency media server with a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and a travel router. I run a full Linux desktop on my phone. I have an old phone mounted to a wall in the kitchen for listening to the radio. I’m running Raspberry Pi OS on a 2013 Surface RT. Most recently, I’m hosting this blog on a Google Pixel 5 phone. More on that in a later post…

I don’t need any of these things to get “real work done”. I’m not making them for YouTube videos to get views. I make them because it is fun and no one can stop me.

Start doing weird stuff for no reason other than just to do it.

I don’t follow Rodney Norman, but I like this video a lot.

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