Motivation

It's been a while since I've written my last blog post or touched this project.

I've had my share of dev at work, just my personal projects have been left behind. But a few things got me excited to get back to it.

A dude named Aaron Francis

This guy has been working his butt off on side projects, even before he and his business partner formed their startup. Even just watching him hammer away at stuff is really encouraging.

One of his blog posts I remembered from earlier this year was titled "Do literally anything.". It's about finding momentum and motivation from just tackling things, whatever they are—side projects, paperwork, chores—just pick something and go.

Another he wrote is titled "Because I wanted to.". This one grabbed me because it was a blatant response to some crap he had taken for a side project recently. It was his accidental reinvention of tmux for Laravel. A lot of the comments were just "Why not use tmux?" Why build that? "Because I wanted to."

I've been thinking about the handful of repetitive things I've wanted to do with this project, just because I wanted the experience of building things myself—like auto-posting to other social networks. But for a while, I've had thoughts like "Maybe it's a waste of time", "I have to cram on stuff like this", "It's been done a million times", "I don't blog that much anyway" etc.

Seeing Aaron's posts about just doing anything and his work on Solo was pretty clarifying. We really should just tackle what's on our plate, and we can just enjoy our craft—really, it's fine. Creativity doesn't have to be about productivity-maxing or ROI.

Watching others' successes

Another thing that made me want to pick my side project work back up was seeing consistent work and fun, creative (even unorthodox) side projects from other devs actually lead to other successes for them.

I've seen a lot of this over the last few months, but there are 2 very recent ones that come to mind.

Another guy named Newton Job had spent a couple of years or so (that I saw) tweeting short tips for making better use of Laravel's toolkit. Then one day, Jeffrey Way from Laracasts made him a public job offer.

Next, @s4rah_dev has been building a portfolio site designed after a Windows XP desktop, including cranking out a ton of faux desktop apps that actually work—and she soon landed her first dev job.

Success stories like these make for some great motivation, especially when you get to watch them unfold.

Motivated 🔥

It's been a while. There's a lot of writing to do, improvements to make here, new project ideas to try, and a cool new PHP version released recently.

Time to get moving again. 👨‍💻