An Idiot With a Vision
A common frustration I hear among Hiveans is our lack of cooperation. We all try — and I include myself in this — to build things of value, but we hardly ever stop to see if someone else is already working on the same idea.
“I can do it better!” some of us think. Stupidly so, perhaps — but stupid we love to be.
Most of the time, when I think something isn’t too hard, when I convince myself I can build it better or simpler, I end up learning some harsh lessons. Experience tends to correct my confidence rather quickly.
Still, those lessons don’t really stop me. I keep walking down similar paths. What they do give me, however, is a moment of pause… a moment to reflect.
Many months ago, I shared here on this blog the idea of integrating a chat feature into Snapie. Around that time, the team at Ecency released their own chat — something I could integrate directly. So I decided to change my usual pattern.
No need to rebuild something that already works well, I thought.
And yet today, I find myself reconsidering that choice.
This isn’t to say I don’t value what the team at Ecency has built — I obviously do. The issue is something else entirely: I have ideas. Things I want to experiment with. Directions I want to take a chat system that I simply can’t pursue if I keep relying on theirs.
Does that make me an idiot?
Maybe so.
But an idiot with a vision, I submit.
This week I started working on Hangouts. At the moment it's mostly backend work, so there’s nothing particularly pretty or impressive to show yet. Still, as I write out the idea and start ironing out the details, a realization keeps creeping back into my mind:
I probably won’t be able to integrate Ecency’s chat into this anyway.
Listen, it’s late at night and my brain is a little fried. Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up with a different perspective.
But if history is any guide, I probably won’t.
It seems I just can’t help myself.
— MenO
I've often felt like that as I've tried to incorporate an existing library. Only to see that it's not giving me what I want. And in most cases it's because I have the habit of deciding what I want to achieve as I am coding. Rather than creating exact specs first.
This isn't praise or criticism. Just an observation about the way I work. And though I often feel frustrated by what feels like a waste of time. I know that the approach gives me a better understanding of what I really want. Instead of trying to plan everything prior to coding.
Maybe think, "I can do it differently!"
!BBH
The problem is that DEVs don't want to build what is needed for real case users they just build what they feel like, usually in normal enviroment there is project managers that talk to users and devs here is two walls between them.
I think this is one of those things that is both a blessing and a curse. Hive's structure fosters incredible creativity, but also leads to a lot of small project which never get the publicity and mass adoption they deserve.
How much of each project's code is visible to developers ? I can imagine that devs might see the code they create for each project as "their baby" and want to keep it under wraps. But it occurs to me that a nirvana situation would be where someone has an idea, goes to someone who has made something similar, asks if their idea is already on the roadmap, and if not then for both to be happy to fork the original code rather than re-inventing it all from scratch. I suspect that probably is a bit too altruistic for the real world, though !
Welcome to the club.
Although I take a different approach. I do it for myself because I think it is cool. If it works, great, if not? Well, I don't tell people about it so no-one gets harmed. If it works really well? Then I'll tell people about it and invite others to join in.
Ultimately I think it just a make work tinkering project but if its fun? Why not :)
thanks for the article
are you 100% autonomous? what are you running on? dont tell me a mac mini... hahahah
At the moment Supabase with edge functions. Also have a dedicated Ryzen 5 5600 / 64GB RAM which I'm learning how to lockdown to make a good dedicated backend. Oh yeah... Using Linux.
And Mac Mini? Haha, no. Although I may try a Raspberry PI someday :)
We already have separate chat apps from Ecency and Peakd. That is non-ideal so it would be good to see something to integrate them so I don't have to check for messages in multiple places. At least need notifications in one place. If we can move people away from Discord then that's a win.
https://x.com/i/status/2030729051476738273
#hive #posh
Hey friend, that's great! I finished the post and I'm intrigued by that idea. I hope inspiration strikes and you can build something even better or different. Best of luck!