Why I still build indie after 20 years in tech
Building products today is so different. But the excitement is still the same.
Twenty years ago, I built things because I had to prove I could. Competitive programming, olympiads, the thrill of squeezing a solution through a tight constraint. The product didn't matter - the craft did.
Then came the career arc: engineer, lead, CTO. I stopped building and started managing building. That's fine. That's the job. But somewhere in the middle of scaling teams and writing roadmaps and aligning stakeholders, the compulsion quieted down.
What came back
Going indie didn't flip a switch. It was more like pressure releasing slowly. The first week without a leadership agenda, I just wrote code for six hours straight and forgot to eat lunch. Not because I was trying to prove anything - because the problem was interesting and there was nobody to ask permission from.
That's the thing about twenty years in. You know enough to not waste motion. You've seen which ideas die in committee and which ones need to just ship. You stop needing the validation of a roadmap sign-off. The excitement doesn't come from novelty anymore - it comes from compression. Can this thing be simpler? Can I cut this feature and keep the value? Can I ship it before I talk myself out of it?
The honest part
It's also harder. No team to leverage. No budget for the exploratory path. Every decision has a direct cost in time, which is the one thing I can't get more of.
But I'd rather ship a product that does one honest thing well than manage a team building something nobody will remember. That trade still feels right.