Confessions of a product hacker

It has been about 10 years since I started doing web development and I’ve always struggled to find my spot in the project ecosystem. You could describe me as a full-stack developer but that misses the mark. I am inclined to believe that product hacker fits me, and here are some ramblings that will explain why.

I don’t dream about code, I dream about the product

Code, to me, is a means to an end. Some people like to do really awesome things just for the sake of hacking away and love solving riddles in obscure languages.
That’s not me, I love building products. If someone is not going to use what I am building then, What is the point of building it at all?

This means that I blow every interview riddle or code competition but ace doing the actual job of being a developer and even win some hackathons.

Don’t get me wrong I obsess about code, not for the sake of it, but because it is extremely important to have a consistent and clean codebase when you are moving fast.

The lines between front-end, back-end and operations are extremely blurry

When you are building a product, you think about the whole experience. I’ve spent countless hours working on setting up servers to improve load times yet you’ll also find me working on perfecting an interface.

Most of my time is spent on the back-end but that swings from one to the other quite often and I operate under the believe that all the work needs to be performed in a holistic manner.
A piece of back-end code can be great on itself but it needs to work within the environment.

I would rather learn about marketing instead of new algorithms

OK, I said it. This will get me extradited from the developer community but I had to say it out loud.
As a product hacker I want people to actually use my software and if that means doing marketing, UX or customer discovery so be it.

Rarely do I see scientific papers that would really improve the work I am currently doing. That said, without them there wouldn’t be any advances to the whole ecosystem but it’s not up my alley.

The more people that use my products the better I feel. Every time a new user interacts with a product I build we establish a relationship and we talk through features and feedback.

It feels lonely in the middle

Given that it is pretty hard to even describe what is my expertise, it is extremely hard to find peers that are on the same boat.

Technical product managers or full-stack developers are the people who I feel comfortable amongst but I struggle belonging some times.

Repeatedly I heard startup CEOs mention that they are on a similar situation so, maybe, I should try that.