On hosting projects

Hi,

I am Aman, and this safe space is where I am most raw with my thoughts, hop on if you'd like to interact with them :))

Ever since I started my blog, I've treated it as a book that chronicles different phases of my life.

If you look back through the posts, you can trace how my thoughts have evolved over the years, where I've shifted my perspectives, what ideas I've completely changed my mind on, and which beliefs remain constant.

This chapter projects an ideology that I've been reflecting on for a long time, one that deserves its own space.

On shareable links

I don’t always host my projects for others to explore or use, because I don’t feel the need to. Some projects are just to satisfy my curiosity, and sometimes, once I’ve answered my questions, I lose interest.

I view my projects as science experiments. At different points, my curiosity leads me to create a working prototype, but once it’s done, I don’t always feel the need to keep working on it. For me, it’s more of a personal signal that helps me understand where my interests and convictions truly lie.

There is this thing about ideas, the more you think about something, the more your mind generates different versions and possibilities of what it can be. But until you act on those ideas, they stay inside your head limiting your chance of reaching a version that could actually be useful.

I have always found working prototypes to be a useful signal as to whether you want to dive deep into something or not.

A classic example of this is video as a medium. I still believe more and more companies will tackle problems in this space, but I’m just not interested enough to dedicate a significant part of my life to it.

Context: was the perfect example of this experiment,

• I was interested in the problem space
• I wanted to build something that I thought I would use

I built a simple react app with a youtube player and a canvas that helps me create a video library of my own so that I can store contexts from the different videos I consume, right now I clip these videos manually on youtube and store it on notion. In future I might automate this process, but for now, it’s not a big enough problem for me to invest my time in. This experiment is just one case.

I have a few more examples where similar signals led me to either dive deeper or step back.

• Intellilink was a writing extension I developed, I have some ideas about the intersection of AI and headless CMS's. Building intellilink gave me enough clarity to realize I don't want to pursue it further. While the core idea remains the same, I'd be happy being a customer If someone more committed than me decides to solve for it.

• Mnemosyne: follows a similar story to my personal Google search. I have been experimenting with my content consumption data and this project was just one of the ways I tested out my curiosity.

With apps like Claude and ChatGPT in the picture there are multiple ways of satisfying one's curiosity now.

It's truly magical how it gives us a rundown of the possible technical implementations for something we use daily. It even generates a prototype that you can run on your local machine and tinker with.

I can see two camps for the future going forward:

• Theorists: People who are satisfied by just knowing how something works.
• Executioners: People who want to get their hands dirty and truly build it to gain a deeper understanding.

I prefer to be in the latter camp and have always operated that way.

Cartoons like Kiteretsu and Phineas and Ferb where each episode is about a new curiosity have always fascinated me, Building things widens my perspective and gives me the chance to try out different technologies. That being said, I do host projects like Open Source Content Consumption and Product logs. It doesn't necessarily have to be a web app.

I’ve always seen value creation as a challenging problem, and every once in a while, I take a stab at it. This blog is a perfect example of something I want to host and share with the world. I enjoy talking about the things I build, my work, and how I think. I truly believe it provides a certain degree of value to the world.

This is my two cents on building things, I’ll be doing a lot more experiments because building brings me joy, and I never want to be in a position where I’m not doing that.