Even though I spend a significant chunk of my time working on open-source projects, that’s not everything I do. My work focus often dictates my open-source contributions, so today, I decided to touch on that and talk about what you won’t see on GitHub.

In 2017, I left my last full-time employee position and started my journey as a software entrepreneur. It’s been a rocky seven years with many ups and even more downs.

I unsuccessfully launched a series of products, failing to market each of them until, after three years, one started getting traction. Ironically, it was the first project I launched, which I initially deemed too niche, and I moved on.

It’s called Chirr App, a Twitter app that helps users write, publish, and schedule threads and tweets. It grew from a one-week project to one of the most popular Twitter thread writers. One of its power users, Josh Pitzalis, became my business partner after giving me a ton of helpful feedback. We hired an extra developer and steadily grew until Twitter got into the hands of Elon Musk.

In a year, Chirr App went from a product featured by Twitter to a product smashed by X.

After changing hands, Twitter (yet again) became a very hostile platform to its developers, practically overnight destroying a vivid ecosystem of third-party apps and services. We couldn’t afford its gigantic $42K/mo API plan, so we cut a lot of functionality, which, along with widespread resentment toward the new Twitter owner, led to a wave of users leaving Chirr App or Twitter altogether.

After six years of challenges, when I thought I had finally found success as a software entrepreneur, we had to start anew.

During that time, ChatGPT blew up, questioning whether we should stay in the text content creator industry and try to pivot Chirr App and support other social networks.

After a few weeks of consideration, we decided to join the AI craze and find a product focused on selling shovels rather than digging gold.

So in February 2023, we started Daisy Chain, a no-code AI workflow builder, which, a year later, we’re pivoting to a prompt management system, Mind Control.

Mind Control is now my main focus and a massive inspiration for open-source work.

Unlike most of my previous products, Mind Control is built for developers, and it turned out to be a critical component contributing to my enjoyment of work. I’m, after all, first and foremost a developer, and I understand developers more than anyone else. Understanding your core audience is not only useful but also leads to challenging tasks, making other developers’ lives easier.

For example, right now, I’m building a custom npm registry that generates a custom package for the users, and it involves a lot of code generation, and I love it! The only thing that is more fun than writing code is to write code that writes code.

I might even end up creating my own language, which is even more fun! But that’s a topic for another post.

I think that’s enough for today. Hopefully, it provided some context for what I’m doing.

Until the next time!