Restrictions

I’m always happy for a friend when they start a job at Apple — but I’m also sad when it means they have to stop their community activities: no more podcasting and blogging, developer meetup organizing, presenting at conferences, writing side-project apps, contributing to open-source things.Brent Simmons

Those sort of restrictions is one of the reasons why I don't want to have a "job", i.e. be an employee.

Regret

inessential: Why I’m Writing These Particular Apps by Brent Simmons (inessential.com)

I’ve worked all these decades to be able to be in the position where I have the ability and freedom to write the apps I want to write. Anyone could argue that I should be putting my skills and experience toward something more likely to be earth-shaking, and that’s fair — but I believe I can do the most good by making the apps I was born to make, rather than working at something that doesn’t excite me.

 

Large numbers of users doesn’t excite me. High-quality, open source Mac apps excite me. Bringing the power I enjoyed with Frontier to a new generation excites me. Bringing RSS reading back excites me.

 

My goal is just to be able to continue working on these apps, no matter how few or many users they have. My exit strategy… well, eventually cognitive decline will come, and I’ll write less code and do more writing about the apps. And eventually I’ll end up turning them over to someone else (or some group). But hopefully that’s 15 years from now, at least.

I have a great deal of regret for not following my passion and continuing to develop web applications. I stopped around 2010. I should have followed my passion instead of a paycheck.