What I Am Grateful For as a Builder

Year-end gratitude posts usually skip the technical. This one will not. I build software for a living, so the things I am grateful for are the things that make building possible. These are the people, tools, and circumstances that let me ship work this year.

The Open Source Maintainers

I use thousands of open source packages I did not write. Someone maintained each one. Most of them for free, on nights and weekends, for years. Every npm install and pip install is a debt I owe to maintainers I will never meet. FastAPI, Next.js, Pydantic, ruff, Django, boto3: all maintained by people who chose to share their work.

The Documentation Writers

Good documentation is a rare gift. Bad documentation costs hours. This year I benefitted from many excellent docs (Pydantic, Anthropic, AWS SAM, Next.js) and suffered through a few bad ones. The gap between the two is measured in hours of my life. Thank you to the writers of good docs.

The Clients Who Trust Me

Every client who hires a solo consultant is taking a risk. No safety net, no redundancy, no team behind me. The clients who signed contracts this year are trusting that I will do good work and ship on time. That trust is not assumed. It is given. I try to be worthy of it.

The Tools I Did Not Have to Build

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Things I did not have to build this year:
  - An operating system
  - A web browser
  - A database engine
  - A programming language
  - A deployment platform
  - An AI agent
  - An email delivery service

Every one of those took thousands of person-years to build. I rent them for a few dollars a month. The leverage is historical. I do not take it for granted.

The Readers

Every person who reads these articles is giving me their attention in an attention-scarce world. Every newsletter reply, every shared link, every quiet nod from a DM. Writing to no one is possible. Writing to someone is motivating. Thank you for being someone.

The Time to Learn

I am in a season of life where I can learn new things and try new tools. That is not true for every season. I am grateful for the runway that let me experiment this year.

The Ability to Say No

The ability to turn down bad-fit projects is a privilege built on good-fit projects. I am grateful to be in a position to say no to things that do not fit, which is made possible by the things that do.

What I Hope For

For everyone reading this: the skills to build, the trust to do the work, the tools to make it lighter, and the people to share the output with. Those four are enough.

Merry Christmas. For ongoing projects worth supporting, consider contributing to open source maintenance for the tools you use daily.