In the spirit of just starting

HI!

I'm Chris. Long time reader, first time poster. I've been voraciously listening to the Indie Hackers podcast this month and I can't help but reflect that so much of the advice on there is to JUST START.

I've been a software engineer with a day job for the better part of the last 15 years. I'm very lucky to have had the experiences I've had professionally but they've always left me wishing I was more in control of my own destiny. But the classic question always pops up.. where do I even start?

Like most software engineering types I tend to err on the side of over analyzing problems up front, try to get a perfect plan in place first, then begin on the solution. If I just read one more book, or take one more class, or listen to one more podcast, then I'll be ready.

I'm realizing now that this will never happen so, here I go. I'm going to start intentionally building the wrong thing! I know it won't be the most efficient route, and I know it's ~probably~ not going to go anywhere. But probably beats the hell out of definitely and I know if I keep waiting around for inspiration then I'll definitely never get anywhere. How's that for rational logic?

So what to build? They say to scratch your own itch, and one of the most painful things about being a professional software engineer is reviews. I know I did some important work over the last 6-12 months, but crawling back over PR's in retrospect can feel really disjointed and not capture the real wins you feel like you got.

I want to build a tool to help people engineers easily track their daily work, Github PR's / issues, links to ticketing systems(clubhouse, jira, etc), simple text based notes, etc. The goal is simply this, if you update this tool daily (for even 5-10 minutes), you should be able to have really great things to say both in your daily standup meeting, but also during your next review cycle. This has massive upside for promotions and raises, and can also really help if you're hearing the voice of imposter syndrome in your head. Maybe that voice would quiet down if you saw a sweet graph of progress. Or that you had clicked 💪🏻 for your ruthlessly simple (but highly effective) emoji checkin for the last two weeks straight! Uh oh the feature creep is already starting.. !

I have not validated this idea and don't know if anyone wants it but me (or if anything already does this exact thing!!) but I just wanted to post something about starting to build in public and hopefully inspire someone else to shake off the paralysis of waiting for the right thing. It's not gonna happen.

So let's at least make something and throw it away! Woo!