Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    I am not an entrepreneur, I am an indie web developer

    After writing a post about the experience of founding a startup teaching me the value of staying in school, I've come to realize that maybe if I was really a startup founder at heart the lesson would have been different and I would have thrown school in the bin, gotten rich and famous and never looked back.

    Yeah, right, especially the rich and famous part, that would surely happen right? Every startup is a smashing success, especially the ones founded by 22 year olds with their heads up their arses.

    But even though I might be too green to be a proper founder, I still seem to be somewhat entrepreneurial. I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't trying to _create _something. Following the rules, focusing on a single thing somebody tells you to do ... yeah that's never quite worked for me.

    Whether it was learning cursive in first grade when teachers were telling me that I should first learn to print, or trying to design a killer spider robot that was twenty meters tall and shot lasers out of its fangs when I should have been learning the basic principles of ... you know ... reality (this was fourth grade I think).

    Or even later, when I was trying to get my own opensource web development framework off the ground instead of studying the basics of polynomials and in college when I was ... well there was a bunch of things, ranging from bringing urbandictionary to the Slovene language, to founding a startup and later creating HipsterVision.

    Fact of the matter is, there has simply never been a point in my life that I didn't have a side project or two, three, four.

    Where was I going with this ... oh, right, what I'm trying to say is that I don't like to call myself an entrepreneur even though I might have some of the spirit and the big dreams. There are a bunch of connotations that come with being one of Those, a whole bunch of expectations, limitations and ... well it just sucks.Sure, it's a nice french buzzword, but it's useless and boring.

    Not to mention hard to spell.

    Rather than being an entrepreneur, I'm an indie web developer.

    I don't need to tie myself down to a single project for the next five years of my life. Nope, I do projects because they're fun. Because they let me learn shit. And most of people, because I want people to use them.

    Sure, it's fun that most of my projects turn out to be indirectly profitable, it wouldn't be too bad if some of them became directly profitable either, but first and foremost, I do them because they're fun and because they make me an awesomer person.

    Published on June 17th, 2011 in Uncategorized

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about I am not an entrepreneur, I am an indie web developer

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️

    Created by Swizec with ❤️