To build, or not to build

These days I’m a rollercoaster of emotions ― I guess as a result of COVID19 and spending so much time at home. In particular, these days I’m thinking a lot about Tuist and my devotion for it. I really like building it, working on building something valuable for the users ― building something that is simple and more intuitive than what they’d get exposed to in Xcode. However, there’s also another version of myself telling me that I’m wasting my time building something while Apple is building the Swift Package Manager and everyone is waiting for the “official” thing to meet everyone’s needs.

Another negative thought that I’ve had lately is: what if I end up wasting my time replacing feature after feature what Xcode provides? That has never been the goal for Tuist, but the more I work on it, the more I realize people want to see in their projects what they see in Xcode. I don’t think Tuist should do that because that’ll bring the same accidental complexity Xcode ended up with. But that means a lot of energy conveying Tuist’s ideas and convincing people to go down a different path. I don’t like pushing ideas onto people, or at least feeling that I’m doing it. I tend to have a lot of ideas, which I codify into tools that I build, or guidelines that I publish, like the microfeatures one. If people like them fine ― if they don’t like them, that’s fine too. However, once they are onboard with some original ideas, doing shifts or doing gentle pushbacks is an uncomfortable thing for me to do. I guess it’s something I’ll have to learn to do, considering I’ve been envisioning a handful of Tuist’s core ideas.

What I’m doing a lot these days, which helps a lot, is looking at the project from an angle of positivisim:

• The opportunity the project gave me to connect with very talented people with great values.
• The opportunity to re-imagine existing workflows that people have accepted for years and challenge myself with simplifying them.
• Building simple things in a world of complexity gives me a huge sense of accomplishment.
• By building this project I’m impacting people’s lives through the companies that have already adopted the project.
• Having the opportunity to work on building a community and a product that people can talk about and enage with.

And well, those are my thoughts about my relationship with Tuist in the morning of May 6th 2020. I love this project and I’ll continue building great stuff into it.