Growing up, I've always had a unique relationship with money. While I didn't grow up "rich", money was never a thing I had to think about. Sometimes I got what I wanted, other times my parents told me it was outside of their budget and I understood(even if I was mad).
Early Perspective on Programming and Money
I don't think I'm unique in feeling like this, but some part of me felt like trying to make money with programming was bad. It felt like programming with the express goal of making money was bad. In my mind, programming was this pure "thing" and using it solely to pursue money dirtied it. I even saw people who did that as dirty as well.
Sure they could do what they wanted but I cringed whenever they would call themselves programmers or god forbid "software engineers" because they weren't "real programmers" like me.
Keep in mind, this is me at around fourteen years old. Eleven years have passed since then and I've changed a lot. I've come to understand that wanting to make a lot of money isn't a bad thing. If programming helps someone achieve that, then more power to them.
Reflection on Pieter Levels' Article
A few days ago I read an article by Pieter Levels titled "How I build my minimum viable products". I read it because I've been thinking about ways to make money with programming and he seemed to be good at doing just that. I think it's a helpful article and if you want to do a similar thing to what he's doing, go read it.
While reading the article, two sentences caught my attention.
Programming is not my passion. Making stuff is my passion.
I felt a little uncomfortable reading that. The making stuff part I can understand because, of course, I want to make stuff, but I think I still agreed with fourteen-year-old me on some level. So I decided to sit down and think about why it made me feel uncomfortable beyond it dirtying programming and I came up with an answer that felt right.
Should I sell out?
Changing Perspective
It felt like it was an either or choice. One thing that helped me changed my mind was this stream by George Hotz titled [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2bXEUSAiTI]["what is programming? (noob lessons!)]"].
In the stream he makes a distinction between a thing he calls "High Brow Software Engineering" and another he calls "Translating business requirements into code". We call both of them programming but they're different things. I think the latter is self explanatory but the former is best explained by George here.
Conclusion
The conclusion I came to was that I can do both. One can be a thing I do for work and the other can be something I do for fun. The thing that I will keep in mind is that while I am "selling out" I'm still going to be selective in the things that I build. I'm not going to build yet another AI tool that uses OpenAI's APIs in a really basic way for example.
While the things I'm passionate about may not bring money in the short term, I think I should still do them because I enjoy them. On the other hand, I need money so I will "sell out" at least for a time and create products that people want to use. The hope will be that in the future I can spend more time on the programming I enjoy and less time on the one I don't enjoy.
From now on you'll be seeing a lot of projects that I will be working on. Some of them will be products designed to make me money and some will be things I think are cool. While I'm doing this, I will be on the lookout for something that is both fun and profitable.
Hopefully I find it.