Might sound silly but I LOVE: Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections.
They single handedly made me interested in how things were made, how things were on the inside. How things were engineered.
Help people.
Just make sure you're focused on helping people with software. Doing something useful for them. Doesn't matter who/what coded it. were we really writing code anyways? Coding languages are abstractions.
Just get to the heart of what people want. Talk to people and help them. Most humans on Earth, at least, aren't technical.
I find that internal frustrations are solved by external validation. Seeing someone happy and joyful from my work, makes it all worth it.
Ask the customer for a referral to someone who has the same pain point. Let them reach out to your future customers for you.
What you should do is just talk to users. People who are actually using what you're building.
If you're searching for more, there's search points all around their role, their pain point, their industry. Find very specific words that people with your pain point actually use to search. Not just "best app to do X" but really what are they posting about and how do they talk in public? IF not then you'll have to do some cold emailing, cold DM's, You'll have to talk to people.
Get on their laptops and install something for them or sit down at their desk and see what they are doing and how you can help.
Wait is this a joke?
I think it's incredibly useful to have these basic 5 heuristics. I've been trying to wrangle the agents to make very simple deletions and text edits quicker, faster. But just saying "go faster on these edits" isn't doing it.
I used to have a single dashboard of all the users in my admin page of my site/startup. Now I've vibe coded a bunch of charts, and actionable tasks I can take from the admin dashboard. It's become my command center for my site/startup.
I'm 42. Nearly every 5 years for the past 20 years I've had a career change. From working in Theatre to TV/Film, to Startup, to Google Sheets wizard.
Each progress hasn't been a full on "career change" but rather, a sort of side project I was interested in took over my entire world.
Doing theatre, I'd work with video guys.
While in Video department, I did graphics to turn to Digital Content.
While doing digital content, I automated a lot. learned to code Excel VBA,
while trying to survive in a PA job, I automated Google Sheets
While doing google sheets in a company, I side gigged doing online growth.
While doing online growth, I learned to code.
I coded my own site, I did more and more google sheets and created Better Sheets 5 years ago.
Now I play board games because I want to get off screen with friends/family.
I am considering creating a physical gaming center/board game cafe. which might be a new career that I didn't go to school for and didn't have to even think about transitioning. If some side project becomes a full time work... great!
Formatting Google Sheets. I work all day every day in google sheets. I make video tutorials, and templates, and tools. Sometimes I work with clients/for clients. Sometimes I just make something on my own. Been thinking more and more about coding up a formatting engine in apps script. As that's what I've done many times before. But really would perhaps a SaaS or a Chrome add-on (not a sheets Add-on) be able to handle this better? But I don't really know how it would handle looking at a sheet and knowing what to format it like. Or would some kind of template actions be able to account for data out of place. This is where I fall apart in my thinking and wonder if someone else could really take a crack at a good UI for this. Instead of me who I am too in the weeds.
