As FreeAgent grew, I increasingly worked only superfically on technical stuff which is funny since I was the “chief” (weird) technical “officer” (also weird). I’d still look at code occasionally, but I mainly organised work for other people or sat in meetings discussing the work that other people did. It was necessary I suppose, but a little dispiriting.
For many years I thought that I was done with coding. I didn’t think I enjoyed it that much anymore and, hey, I was now a “leader” and had better things to do.
This came to a head at 37signals which was the least technical role I’ve ever had. At FreeAgent I still had agency to dive into the code, put up my own PRs and make suggestions to others. Not at 37. I was hired for people/management experience, not for technical prowess. I make no claim to having the mad skills of some of the programmers there, but being unable (unwilling I suppose – hello imposter syndrome) to contribute and watching people ship great work made me hungry again.
Since starting an extended sabbatical last summer, I’m back in the code and it’s been a revelation! I’m using the same old toolbox (Ruby, Rails) with a new tool (Tailwind) and, crucially, a new colleague in the form of AI – ChatGPT of course and, more recently, Github Copilot. I’ve found this incredibly productive. The incredible Rails ecosystem allows you to build apps quicker than ever, but the addition of a virtual colleague that can answer (most) questions, deal with time-consuming necessities (e.g. “write some tests for this controller”), and be a sounding board for ideas and questions is a productivity rocketship. It’s very hard to get stuck as a solo developer now. Or, rather, it’s much easier to become unstuck!
During my sabbatical I plan to build a series of small but useful apps. These are not intended to be much more than side projects, apps you could easily build in your free time as you continue in your day job. Small bets. Hopefully they’ll generate a little passive income, but that’s useful as validation as much as it is for funding my camera habit.
The first of these was Pagecord which I build in 4 days (it’s free). The second, launching today is Teamlight, which took about 3 months (arguably a bit much, but it was on and off). I think Teamlight could be useful for a lot of companies. Here’s the pitch:
There's a secret sauce to running a healthy and productive company that is widely overlooked.
Your team is the beating heart of your company, but all too often your people don't know your people. Companies lack a single place to look up who's who, what they do, and what they've been working on.
I built Teamlight to fix that!
Teamlight is a simple, beautiful showcase for your people and their great work. Automatically synced with your Google Workspace.
Bring your team together, today!
Time will tell if any of today’s SaaS-fatigued businesses are interested in another tool, however low touch, but as it’s an intentionally simple app without too many moving parts, it’s easy for me to sustain at low cost with (hopefully!) low maintenance.
If Teamlight is a whopping flop, it doesn’t matter. It was fun to build, I learned a lot, and it contributed to my growing library of useful code and patterns that I can apply to the next project.
Speaking of which, I already have the idea for my next app which I plan to get cracking on soon ✨
