#2445T

It is nearly impossible to architect and manage a project that you’re a developer on. Let me rephrase that. I hate this fucking project and the chaos and that there is no PM to hold things together and no product design and no business logic and nothing, just me, ad-hoc bodging things together in a framework I’m new to.

So, it turns out, my PM and product skills and approach are role-dependent. Now I feel like I’m in a dev role, and I cannot, for the life of me, imagine thinking about product logic.

This project is a mess from the start and is showing me that I’m not a multiple hats guy. I need a context and a point of view to act from. So I’m not great as a solo founder type, because I can’t easily switch perspectives and roles. I’m either product, PM, arch, dev, BA, whatever, but can’t to multiple.

I also started out with a techno-retro feeling in my heart and so I’m looking at this whole thing as a perfect little UNIX thing, where it needs to be a single thing and then options and it’s like a fine instrument that if you master can make incredible music. In the meantime my designer girlfriend is trying to break it into user flows and screens and stuff and I hate it. Kind of funny, how I’ve come to dislike modern tech and software approaches along with the bullshit that comes with modern software businesses. When actually, a mix of oldschool clear functionalities and separation of concerns plus modern UX and putting things right at hand for the user could be the perfect approach.

Sadly I started with a different approach, a deep-down desire for an older, simpler, more sane world’s software, or an idealized, imagined version of that, anyway. Now I’m stuck in this approach and I’m not sure I even want to change it yet. Thinking about this project as a good old, web 1.0 era, unixy, hackery, long bearded smart guy program makes me feel a bit better about it, makes me a bit interested in it. And that feels nice, cozy. Not sure I’m ready to come back to the real current world yet.

I get this periodic urge to go on an adventure. As often, today it was triggered again by bumping into a reference to Poles of Inconvenience, a yearly adventure rally where participants spend three weeks trying to get to hard to reach locations with purposely unfit cars (like 1l Suzukis or old Nissan Micras).

The weird thing is, I’ve never really been an adventuring type. I like the sense of uncertainty and freedom that comes from being on the road without a specific plan, but I’ve never followed that to anywhere beyond a randomly picked other town a couple hours from home. But every once in a while I’ll feel this strong longing to go out without a map and purposely do things the inconvenient way.

A lot of the fun of the rallys organized by the Adventurists (the company organizing Poles of Inconvenience) comes from having to problem-solve on the road and making unexpected connections with locals as a result. Maybe that’s what I’m longing for, the unexpected, unplanned, unchoreoghraphed human connection.

That’s something I can find elsewhere, in smaller scale I think. But that’s a story for another day.

Part of my dreaming about doing POI at some point is getting an ultra cheap beater car. Looking at a big local used car marketplace, an old 1l Nissan Micra or 0.8l Daewoo Matiz would cost me about 1-200k HUF (about €250-500). Add to that 500GBP for the participation fee for the rally and it’s a bit out of my budget for now. But getting a car that cheap that actually runs, that feels amazingly liberating.

I briefly drove a 20 year old three door Ford Fiesta. It wasn’t a good car and it had lots of mechanical issues. But I honestly enjoyed that car more than anything else I’ve ever driven or owned. There is something about a small, light, crappy car that puts a smile on my face. Driving the country in that Fiesta felt like a mini adventure every time. Add to that the fact that with a cheap beater like that I don’t feel like I need to be careful with it and it was the most fun car ever. It wasn’t practical, but I honestly miss it sometimes.

At some point, when my finances are in better shape, I want to get a beater like that again, maybe even crappier.

Well, anyways.