Build the thing you wish to see in the world

Two weeks away from my day job taught me something important: for the vast majority of my developer career I’ve been confusing building products with building businesses. That distinction kept me from taking the leap on a lot of ideas, but a few recent experiences have helped me see past that.

The first week of my time off was spent going to Microsoft Ignite where I was a speaker and worked at the GitHub booth. Those four days were a whirlwind. I did my talk on Tackling tech debt with GitHub Copilot (which unfortunately was not recorded, but you can see a similar and more condensed version of it here from GitHub Universe). I also did a live demo of GitHub Actions each day, which is one of my favorite tools to talk about, and got to talk to hundreds of excited folks about how to use GitHub Copilot.

One talk attendee gave me my absolute favorite bit of feedback I’ve received from a talk, where they said that my talk about tech debt and the struggle to get it prioritized even when it’s important was “like therapy”. Incredible.

Once I came back I decided to take the entire week of Thanksgiving off, just because I could. My original intention was to do literally nothing those days. But I’m tragically incapable of being bored.

Instead, here’s what I spent my time doing:

Streaming on Stream.Place

While scrolling through Bluesky at the beginning of my time off, I came across a post where someone was talking about Stream.Place, a Twitch-like app for streaming on ATProto. That was pretty mind-boggling to me. There’s this whole full-featured streaming service a group of folks have made around the ATProto ecosystem!

For those who aren’t aware, I used to stream video games on Twitch for about a year several years ago. It started out because I had seen my brother streaming and wanted to give it a shot, and then found that it was a nice and weird replacement for talking to folks when I was working remotely in 2017-2018. The venn diagram of folks currently reading this and folks that know me from my streaming days is likely two perfect circles.

That said, I already have the tools and skillset for getting a stream up and running, so I decided to give it a shot just to test out stream.place. I don’t think I’ll have time to stream regularly, but I really enjoyed it! It was a nice way to hear from folks, mostly those already in the ATProto space, and to work through some problems while programming. I experimented with building a service to allow easy re-surfacing of old Bluesky posts to repost them, so I could do something like “Here’s what I said a year ago, wasn’t that silly!”

Getting up to speed on ATProto

Ever since chatting with Nick Gerakines earlier this year about ATProto, I’ve been wanting to learn more about how it works and do something in that ecosystem. I have a lot of strong opinions about the way that social media is set up and how it has changed the world, and ATProto seems to address a lot of those concerns. However, I haven’t had any time to set aside to actually read the docs and tinker with it.

That is until I got some time off! I spent quite a bit of my free time reading through the ATProto docs and learning the different pieces of it. It’s a pretty simple setup now that I understand it better, and now I’m doing more reading within the community to see how things are taking shape. It seems there is a thriving community of folks building things and contributing to ATProto and it is a lovely spot that I think I may try to make a home for a bit.

I really think this may be the future of social media. If we’ve learned anything from the past, it’s that open source nearly always wins in the long term. If you’ve been avoiding it, now might be a great time to check out Bluesky!

Reading This is for Everyone

My buddy Ryan Coates also shared this book recommendation recently, and just by chance I still had some free Spotify audiobook time for the month, so I decided to jump into it. This is an incredible book!

It’s a memoir from Tim Berners-Lee, who basically created the internet. Or at least HTML and HTTP, which is the backbone of the internet.

As someone working in this space who doesn’t have a computer science background that I believe some of this history would have been taught in, this is an incredibly fascinating overview of where we’ve been and where the internet is going. I am a huge fan of the open internet and have a ton of ideas from the book that I can’t wait to put into action.

Making connections

Here’s where all of these seemingly random activities connected in an unexpected way. I’ve had a few recent conversations on the Overcommitted podcast that have really been sticking out in my brain recently.

The first conversation was with Brad Heller, where we talked about his journey to becoming a startup founder and his role as an engineering leader. He has one bit of advice that he often gives engineers looking to level up:

Go build something outside of your area entirely… by going and working in a different area entirely you’ll take ideas that these engineers have and bring them back to your work and become a better engineer.

@brittanyellich The best advice for Senior engineers looking to level up to staff or principal. check out the next #Overcommitted podcast airing Oct 7 to learn more from engineering leader Brad Heller about how to be more successful in your career as a #softwareengineer #bigtech #startups ♬ original sound - Brittany Ellich

I wanted to do something a bit out of my comfort zone. Recently I’ve been building a lot of extremely scalable billing applications at GitHub, but I miss working on a smaller team and product. I love the flexibility that comes with building things on a small team really fast!

The second conversation was with Rick Turoczy, who has been writing about and helping startups in the Portland area for two decades now. He said:

If you want a product to exist, just go build that product. If you start a company to build it, you’re building a whole other thing.

@brittanyellich The differences between a product and a business: when is it worth it to build a business around it vs when is it worth it to just build a product? all that and more on the next #overcommitted ♬ original sound - Brittany Ellich

I have been stuck in this mindset that if I’m going to build something that I want to see in the world, that it really only makes sense to do if I monetize it and find some way to make money on it. But building a product and building a business are really two different efforts. And I don’t want to build a business!

With that I decided to try my hand at building Collective, a social media app built on ATProto to connect with your friends and whatever media they’re enjoying! I don’t have anything live to share just yet, but I do have a demo of the app here if you’d like to see where it’s at.

Building something big and new has come with some scary thoughts:

What if it doesn’t make any money?

It doesn’t have to! It’s a product, not a company 😃

I’m gainfully employed. I’m not building this because I want to make money on it or because I think it’s some exit strategy from working for someone else. I love my job.

I’m building this because there are some features that I want to see in this type of product that I haven’t seen yet, like easily copying and sharing lists with connections (so that my list of Go resources I commonly share with others is easier to share). I’m building this because I’m envisioning forcing all of my friends and family to use it, and if that’s the only target audience of the product then that’s totally fine.

It’s okay to build things just for fun.

But this type of app already exists, why build another one?

This is also true. In fact it’s true many times over! There are tons of these kinds of apps out there, why would I start from scratch and build my own?

The simple answer is: because I want to! I feel like I have built up my own software engineering and product management skillset to a point where I want the challenge of making 100% of the decisions and building my own app. And it has been a lovely challenge so far, with using ATProto making a lot of the things I would otherwise struggle with much easier!

Build the thing you wish to see in the world

If you’d like to see a little demo of what I’ve built so far, you can check it out here. I’m hoping to have this live by January-ish.

It’s such an incredible time for builders right now. We have amazing tools, thriving open source communities, and-thanks to platforms like ATProto-the infrastructure to build without the overhead of figuring out your auth and persistence layer.

So here’s my challenge to you: What would you build if making money on it wasn’t the point? What product have you been putting off because you couldn’t figure out the business model? Maybe it’s time to just build it. I’ll be sharing updates on Collective as I go—follow along on Bluesky or GitHub if you want to see how this experiment unfolds.