The Developer's Prayer: From Finishing to Just Starting
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the popular developer humor account 'I Am Devloper' (@iamdevloper), which has a profile picture of the character Napoleon Dynamite. The tweet reads, 'lord give me strength to finish* all the side projects I've bought domains for'. This initial statement is then humorously corrected on a new line with '*start'. This meme perfectly encapsulates a widespread phenomenon in the developer community: the cycle of enthusiasm for a new idea, leading to the purchase of a domain name, followed by perpetual procrastination where the project is never even begun. The self-correction from the relatable problem of not finishing projects to the more acute problem of not even starting them is what makes the joke so painfully funny and relatable, especially to senior developers with a long history of abandoned side-project ambitions
Comments
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My collection of expired domains is basically a graveyard of series A funding I never had to look for
My Route 53 zone has more parked domains than our monolith has dead feature flags - turns out “buy domain” is still the only part of my MVP that ships to prod on day one
My domain portfolio is worth more than my 401k, but at least the domains auto-renew so I can maintain the illusion that someday I'll build that revolutionary SaaS that definitely needs both the .io AND the .ai versions
Every senior engineer has a graveyard of domains that seemed like billion-dollar ideas at 2 AM - a portfolio of 'TODO: Build MVP' that rivals their actual GitHub contributions. The asterisk correction from 'finish' to 'start' cuts deep: we've all been that architect who spent more time bikeshedding the perfect tech stack and designing the infrastructure than writing a single line of actual business logic. It's the engineering equivalent of premature optimization, except we're optimizing the domain name instead of the code that will never exist
Domains: the developer's CAP theorem - Consistency of commitment impossible, Availability of ideas infinite, Partitioned by quarterly renewal pings
I practice Domain-Driven Delay: annual Route 53 charges, zero commits to main
Practicing Domain-Driven Nondevelopment: buy the perfect URL, sketch the architecture, and let auto-renew be the only job that ever hits five nines