SupabaseApril 6, 2025
I think the days of standing out by being a dev who ships are mostly over.
Shipping is a given. You should be able to ship stuff. Best way to get good jobs is by proving you can do it. Open source projects, contributions, tutorials, side projects, whatever.
It is easier than ever. Everyone can do it.
That basically means you're competing with everyone now. 4 or 5 years ago being a person who shipped made you stand out.
Most people are not capable of getting a project finished and showing it to the world. If you were capable of shipping you only competed with people who shipped and there were more opportunities than people who shipped. That's changing.
So a good question to ask now is, what makes you stand out now that shipping isn't a differentiator?
TailwindCSS is amazing not because it can compile 30 million classes into a css file in 0.3 seconds or whatever.
It's amazing because Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger have incredible taste. Both for design, UX, tooling, and for developer experience. If TailwindCSS wasn't a pleasure to use it wouldn't have been so successful.
Aaron Francis is a developer and incredibly successful at creating educational video content for developers because he has great taste. For visuals, communication and distribution.
Linear is basically Jira made by people with good taste. And they only hire developers with good taste. Just look at the things the devs working there have built.
AI doesn't have good taste. I am not sure if it ever will.
Taste isn’t about pretty UIs. It’s judgment. It’s knowing what to build, what to cut, and how to make something feel right for the user. You can have great taste with a terminal app if it solves the problem elegantly
The problems you solve require good taste to come up with good solutions. Applies if you're building an internal tool for your company, an open source library or a B2B SaaS as a side project.
That mostly means marketing. I just didn't want to put marketing in the heading.
Understanding what people want to pay attention to.
Being able to capture that attention.
Finding your "unique voice" or whatever you wanna call it.
Giving a clear narrative on why a thing exists or is needed.
Everyone should come up with the strategy that works for them. Mine is simple. Only post something if its either funny (to me), educational or helpful (tools and tips) or positive (giving shout outs to people who ship cool stuff).
When you see a tweet or a video that captures your attention and you enjoy the value you receive from it try to understand why it does that.
It is easier than ever to level up horizontally.
You can be a frontend dev with great understanding of backend, infra, business, design, whatever. Every time you have a task where you're blocked by another team that's an opportunity to dive into that skill. You should.
This is a hard skill to train. How do you become a more creative and original person? Seems like it's almost a natural thing you either have it or you don't.
Write more Writing forces clarity. Share your takes even if you're unsure if it's good. It's what I am doing with this post.
Have strong opinions, held loosely. Strong opinions will guide you. And you can sharpen your thinking by challenging them. Thus making you more "open" to solutions you otherwise wouldn't consider.
Look outside your bubbles. Look at stuff you never have. Philosophy, history, movies, games, books. Fresh ideas come from unexpected places.
And probably the most important one and my favorite.
Ask questions. This one is easy. Ask anything that comes to mind. Make an effort to actually come up with questions. When someone asks "Any questions?" you want to be the person that lifts their hand first. There are no dumb questions!
Read Aaron Francis Blog