Let’s close the loop on Maker May.
I started May with an aggressive plan: ship new features 5 days a week & write about it daily. The goal was to build learning momentum for my next venture.
What happened? I learned a lot, but I miscalculated the cognitive load of establishing a serious writing habit while also learning new coding skills. Learning fast requires ruthless prioritization, so I pivoted my focus to coding.
I also did not release a project 21 days of the month like I originally planned (I hit 11 days with a significant new project or feature). For two reasons: 1) It was a crazy month both personally and professionally, but more importantly 2) in a month where I was juggling maintenance of 7 separate projects, I learned what software engineers have always known, specifically that maintaining projects, debugging and improving your code are the harder parts of software engineering.
AI coding agents offer exponential increase in productivity when building clean-slate projects. But for debugging, refactoring & maintaining existing code, the leverage drops significantly. AI agents are literal, so the better you understand what you’re building, the better they work for you. As I learned this basic lesson, I shifted towards spending more time not just building but learning the underlying fundamentals of what I was building, understanding how to use my coding agents better.
I spent the month focusing on scalable learning. Instead of just shipping new prototypes with little follow through, I tried to focus on learning new platforms & tools that open up new project types for me, building around the tools I’m using to make them faster and more efficient for me and documenting my work and learnings so that I solidify the lessons learned and can more quickly pick up where I left a project and more portably take learnings from one project to another.
So for the next couple of months, I won’t be writing on any specific cadence, but I will continue to push on my learning as I prepare for the next role that I’ll be jumping into in August.
Stay tuned!