The main reason for me creating this blog was for this exact post.

It is quite possibly the most powerful lesson I have ever learned throughout my software development lifecycle. I try to avoid the word career where possible because the majority of time I have spent coding has been outside my career.

Anyway, enough of the waffle. Here’s the idea:

When I started building software, I was meticulous. I thought that everything must be written correctly, we must write it with the correct paradigm, use the correct practice, all of that nonsense. In fact, I thought that people who got nestled in the weeds were the superior devs. You know the kind that I am talking about. I was one of them. I thought everybody should spend their weekends configuring their tmux config and so on.

It wasn’t until I shifted to the building side of software that this really all shifted. I started building for myself. I started building because, well honestly, I wanted to make money from my labour and not make somebody else rich. So I set out building something and used the best practice, avoided creating technical debt and so forth.

It was slow. Then, when the product finally got built, nobody used it.

STOP BUILDING PRODUCTS THAT ARE SCALEABLE. STOP BUILDING PRODUCTS THAT HAVE NO TECH DEBT. BUILD FAST. USE OTHER PEOPLES CODE AS A BASE.

Here is the law: NEVER BUILD ANYTHING FROM SCRATCH. NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER.

For every single one of my SaaS tools that I build, I use the same kit that I have used every other time. It has auth, payments, team roles already built in. I will never ever build this again. Why? Momentum. While you spend weeks making a Stripe config that breaks in production, I have it done.

Not only that. That is only the beginning. Whatever idea I have for my SaaS, I will look on GitHub and take huge inspiration and if the licence permits, take the code. This is why I win. Life is unfair.

Leverage is Law.