An Effect However Small

Six months ago I quit my job to dedicate myself fully to a voice translation application.

As clichéd as it may sound my motivation is to build something that matters.

When I feel down and start wondering what I am doing with my life, working for almost no pay while my former colleagues are making >90K, there’s one glowing screen I like to get back to:

Actual People Using My Stuff!

Those are stats from a very minor project I coded 3 years ago.

It’s a dead simple Chrome extension for the XKCD.com website that displays Reddit comments alongside the comics:

XKCD comics + Reddit comments

Nothing motivates me more than seeing this random project, hacked together during a boring course years ago, still being used by dozens of people every day.

It reminds me how as a computer scientist I can have an effect in people’s life, however small, with 300 lines of code. It reminds me that it’s never been easier to bring an idea to life and to put it into people’s hands. It reminds me why I am doing what I am doing right now: to keep creating more things that people will want to use.

Psst… Read XKCD? Use Reddit? Get the extension from the Chrome store.