Working on your bike is fun. Working on the bike you need to ride to work tomorrow is stressful.
I miss writing toy software. It’s fun. But inevitably I want to use said software and that’s where the trouble starts. You find all the bugs and none of the time to fix them.
I needed to get an invoice out in a timely fashion. As much as I wanted to use my app, I found certain kinks I needed to work out (with styling, adding addresses, etc.) -- This was where I realized what you have articulated.
At some point, it becomes better to prioritize the "fun" in working on my bike, and the "usefulness" of the daily driver bike.
In doing so, perhaps the fun/usefulness of each converges over time.
I'm paraphrasing but -
"Do the hard work that you need to do, but always give yourself an hour a day for the bullshit 'i don't have time for this but I want to do it' stuff.
It'll keep you happy, which will keep you productive through the slog... and those little touches will stand out and make SOME people happy"
For the unfamiliar (the man, not the talk): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Schatz
And the big one: inbound anti-spam.
It's not that issues are frequent, it's just that there's no guarantee they won't be badly timed. There may come a point in your life where (a) you don't have a lot of free time and (b) you badly need a specific email.
I still have the mail domain, I just pay an ISP to handle it for me.
With that said it's a challenge and a chore on its own to curate what "AI" writes. So it's definitely not all roses.
Disclaimer: I'm still early in the experimentation phase. We'll see if i hold these opinions in a few months.
Same goes for my car, it's satisfying doing inexpensive fixes to keep it running. Wouldn't want some mid-2000s BMW project that's stuck in the garage half the time.
Actually, I really like this analogy because
1) We can’t really work on non-trivial fixes for our cars because they are too complex
2) We’ve totally structured our living situations around these over-complex beasts
3) Sometimes they do just break down at random, and it becomes a mini-crisis for everyone involved, which can’t really be resolved without missing a day of work to go to a professional
4) The bike is in exactly the same situation, except you can actually fix most bike problems yourself with a little kit
And yet, it is seen as a serious adult thing to have a car, instead of a bicycle.
Some thoughts:
Outside of, like, customer service, most places are throughput-oriented and it doesn’t even really matter all that much if somebody misses a day.
If we really cared about “uptime” of employees, we’d all be living in bicycle range of our jobs, and able to fix our bikes. Maybe there’d be a bus route as well.
If my bike flats and I'm out of tubes and I have a busy day planned, I have to take it to a local bike shop but those generally close pretty early. If I miss the window to take it to an LBS then I'm SOL. With a car there's generally a developed enough ecosystem that I can get a roadside assistance type service to put a spare on the car until I can actually get my car into a shop.
This is a good analogy for SaaS vs using a tinkerer tool. A tinkerer tool often can be customized exactly to your needs. I can work on my bike at 10 PM in my garage after dinner as long as I have the parts. But sometimes your tinkerer tool is going to leave you working all night or you'll be SOL. But SaaS is generally a full-time job for other folks. Sure you pay money, but there's fewer situations you're SOL.
(Personally when my bike is inop and I need to head to work I use transit.)
And then reality hits. You're married and your partner's job is on the other side of the city. You just bought and house and now you want to switch jobs but you'd be limited to only jobs in biking distance. eTc....
I bike to work (was 4 miles, now 2), but it's unrealistic to expect people to be in bicycle range of their jobs.
Learning how to fix my own cars is something I’ll always be grateful for. They’re not that complex. Most of it is just bolts and a diagram reference.
Sure, if you crack a piston cylinder you just need a new engine, that isn’t really fixable.
Brakes/rotors/calipers, it is almost criminal what you pay a shop for in lieu of doing it yourself. Spark plugs are super easy. Even things like taking the intake manifold off a direct-inject car to replace the fuel injectors isn’t terribly hard.
What has made cars complex is all the electronics that tie into it. The mechanics of an ICE car are mostly about the same.
1) the electronics often are what breaks
2) even if you are good at working on cars, bikes are really, really easy to fix in comparison (I mean, it is a silly comparison).
Of course, they do different things and the thing the car does is much more complex. So it isn’t really a fair comparison. But the fact remains!
Feature doesn't work in Safari? Who cares, I don't use Safari anyway. No need to fix.
2 weeks later when I wasn't busy trying to get it to work, I gave it another shot. This time went so much more smoothly and now everything works (fingers crossed since I haven't actually tried out ALL the functionality).
How about working on your bike that other people also work on daily? That's work.