Not Everything Needs to be a Service

Published: 2023-09-03 10:38 PM

Category: Technology | Tags: code, programming, hacks, hobby, tooling

I often fall into the trap of thinking, "Maybe I should publish this thing for other people to use." And I almost always regret it.

I'm a full-time teacher, not a SaaS manager. Some of my ideas have been okay (at least to me) but most are very specific to my use case in the moment. I need to get over the impulse to publish a site for general use just in case someone, somewhere, wants the same thing. As soon as I do that, I stop being able to use a tool I've made as a way to solve one of my problems and have to start thinking about generic application.

Granted, I've only officially released one or two things, but as soon as I did, I kind of lost interest in maintaining, so I took them back down. They're still there and I could go back and put time and effort into cleaning them up, but I lost the joy of poking at it when I needed to consider customer support.

This has been a therapeutic post for me becuase I'm getting a tool ready to share with students tomorrow and I really need to resist the urge of making it publicly available.