A brief sojourn

December 22, 2024

Starting in 2025, I’m taking a year off from full-time employment to get back to my roots and build something from scratch. Although the last few years provided me with the corporate security blanket to build a lot of software from commit zero, it’s been over a decade since I tried to build a whole product on my own without oversight. Recently I’ve come to realize I need personal risk in my work to feel satisfied. I also want to build something where I am the primary customer. Although designing developer tools for Elastic and Xata let me work around really strong engineers, the products I designed with them weren’t problems I personally ached to solve.

2025 then is about building a product I need. Two years ago I built a custom game table that let me display digital battle maps for Dungeons and Dragons sessions. Although there is a bevy of software to power it, most of the tools are targeted at playing online, not in person games. They have features I don’t need and complexity I don’t want. I want something simple that let’s me build maps on-the-fly as the party goes in the wrong direction. Mostly though I believe that in person gaming is superior to playing over a zoom call.

My guess is there are less than a thousand such tables like the one I built, so this is a very niche tool. It’s not something that would get past round one of a VC pitch. That’s OK. I want to try building a product without worrying about growth for once. I’m going to focus my energy on craft and quality. I’m making a conscious choice to build slow, largely in the dark, eschewing analytics and user tracking. Instead, I’m going to go back to my early Internet ways of deciding what to build based on conversations with users on message boards. This is a personal project, and while I’m hopeful it can turn into a nice, small business, I kind of just want to build something cool again.

The biggest risk in this endeavor beside the obvious financial one is that I’m worried if I can teach myself enough engineering to build the product! I’ve always reached past my design needs into the code, but this is the first time I’m going to tackle something large without a full-time engineering partner. In the past two months I’ve learned quite a bit about database systems, application hosting, network performance, backend technology and CI. Chat GPT has helped along the way of course, mostly as an advising tutor that can point me in the right directions. I’m also working with fantastic contractors (shout out to Dan) for the 3D and art skills that I know I can’t learn that quickly. I also have a long list of smart friends I’m sure I can reach to if I get in too much trouble. After all I still like building with others.

Speaking of learning, I’ve never learned this much, this fast. For a 45 year old that sometimes questioned whether I should just lay low in the executive ranks, this is the level of danger I needed to feel invigorated. Having been here before — this is where I’m best — and I’ve been lucky to be able to take such risks every couple years. Even if the business fails (it wouldn’t be the first time), I’ll have leveled up my skills and can take that knowledge into the next job.

So let’s see how I do! I’m going to start posting updates occasionally so friends can follow along. You can add your email over at Table Slayer if you’d like to be notified of updates. My hope is to have something ready before Spring. Wish me luck!