1. Full speed ahead at a client, implementing key features of an event-sourced system that we’d been modeling for some time now.
2. Spending max mental energy at work and then doing the same with the side projects had started taking a toll on me physically.
3. One of my pet projects actually launched into production with users other than myself, and my shared infrastructure for the side projects made it a bit more difficult to go wild wild west on the deployments.
I obviously can’t say too much about my activities at the client’s, but what I can share is that we have a project where we’re applying event modeling and event sourcing. I can safely say that it’s just been such a great experience to build in, because once the requirements are understood, things are pretty straightforward to implement.
I’m fortunate enough to be working for a client that’s not afraid to try out new things, even providing resources for the developers to better succeed. This is for employees AND consultants alike.
I have to say, not every client is like this, so I certainly appreciate that I’m in a place where we have the opportunity to experiment and try out new ways of solving problems.
I honestly have so much fun at work that I built a timer app to monitor how much I’m working on my client’s stuff, to make sure I’m not overworking. (https://lantern.itsybit.se, and yes, obviously event sourced.)
When I finally got a hold of how much I was putting into my day job, I forced myself to put some of my time into my private projects, at least.
Something was unlocked early this year: if you want to create something, all the blockers you previously thought you had just disappear.
For the longest time I’d had a long backlog of projects that I wanted to create but just didn’t have the time or the (frontend) skill for. This year, with the help of agentic AI, all those reasons/excuses disappeared.
Creation became an addiction. My new year’s resolution was to get off social media to get rid of the doom-scrolling addiction. I remember feeling frustrated about how much time I had wasted just doom scrolling, wanting to read about the depressing news, fights happening, latest viral trends, etc. etc., when I just wanted to shut my brain off when I wasn’t working.
I foolishly thought that putting that time into my personal projects would have put me in a better mental state.
From February to May, I think I built something new every week. I don’t think I regretted any of it, but I was very, very tired.
The only real reason I stopped the app factory was my mistake of building a shared infrastructure for all my apps, for the sake of not wanting to spend money on infra.
The project in question was actually similar to, but different from, the first event-sourced app that I built, ‘choremonkey’.
While choremonkey was tracking chores for one household, ‘LiteHjalp’ was tracking chores done across multiple households and aggregating progress into a group leaderboard.
Because this project shared infra with my other projects, and I consistently had ideas to upgrade and improve it, it caused unnecessary ‘downtime’ for the people using the production app. I think it would have been easy to stand up a separate server if I really needed to, but because it was for a class of 40, I thought suppressing my urge to regularly ship would have been a cheaper option.
Also, I needed to focus on my main day job, the one that actually pays me, and the one that deserves my prime attention, not a half-assed, tired attention.
being in tech 