I build stuff for myself, show it to my friends, they say they need it too, I polish it up and publish.
Also, I use GitHub as a way to socialize without the dopaminergic effects of social networks, and as a hobby since it matches up with my desire to improve the daily life of other people.
Money does not scale very well as a motivating factor for me. Furthermore, deciding what to build based solely on the probability of making profit greatly limits the scope of what I can do, because I don't have the marketing skills to sell something really niche, but I do have the skills to develop it, so just developing it to get feedback and experience is better than doing nothing due to a lack of profitable options.
I'm a wildcard, or in other words I steer away from ever hitting the point of specializing too much in one particular thing, and this is intentional. I strive to be independent and useful in many contexts.
While I appreciate my teammates and partners more than anything, I don't want to rely 100% on them being present/productive/interested.
I started with Pascal ABC in primary, did exceptionally well in class, destroyed the school high scores in typing speed, forgot about it for 5 years, transferred to a new school, met a guy that showed me his website with a custom domain, and realized that I want to do that. He taught me his skills in HTML and CSS, a pinch of PHP, and from that point we partnered up in building creative websites for our school and friends using primarily JS, which was new for both of us.
I eventually started making/reviving solo projects, which got me comfortable with Objective-C, Swift, Bash, and even something as weird as AppleScript.
I spent half my gap year chasing girls and parties, so much that I needed therapy afterwards. Then went through a 10-month Yandex course on MERN stack scoring 100% on the final exam and helping fellow students along the way, got well with TypeScript, and found a job doing that. Having entered the commercial world, I've been occasionally jumping into small products in spare time, getting invited via word of mouth.
By the way, I'm looking for a full-time job right now.
CV: rsm.io/gin
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