Write an extremely useful piece of software and be doomed to open source maintainership in a world consumed by AI and corporations
Continue in web app hell, for twice the work and none of the renown, until you hate technology and desire the isolation of a cabin deep in the woods.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

At least for now, 2 still pays the bills. Which is probably the reason any of us do this bullshit anyway. Otherwise we'd all be creating stuff we can actually be proud of.

Not that I'm not proud of any of the projects I've worked on. Some of them have been a true net good for some segment of society or other and in every case we've aimed at making the user experience as great as possible. Some have later enshittified, but that was after I'd left those jobs. I just think most of the tech stacks have been boring as hell and not a single product has been truly innovative. It's all been boring B2B stuff aimed at making our customers' employees lives easier and automating the boring stuff so they can focus on what they actually like doing (which incidentally is the stuff that makes their bosses money, so everyone's happy when you can spend 5% of your day doing routine "paperwork" instead of 15% or even 20%)

[–] Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 2 points 5 days ago

It does pay the bills, and not that what you did isn't great work, but we get into this to burst boundaries, explore limitations, and just fuck about in general. Its just such a wonder how the things most of us have to do in technology sucks the passion from it.