Invisible Speed

AI is making everything more efficient. We are able to make production-grade software by simply doing it as a background task.

This seems like a fairytale, a utopia that all SWEs dreamed of. However, this is creating more competition.

Since we have so many different priorities-job, school, life, startups, personal projects-it's hard to choose a lane, stick with it, and also deal with this "invisible speed."

It feels like if you don't build your startup, someone else is going to build it faster than you, sell the idea, and live in your dream penthouse in NYC.

Well, that might not happen, but the speed of building production-grade software isn't an illusion.

I recently made a LinkedIn post about this, and one developer made an insightful comment that both eased my worries and gave me something else to worry about-lol.

He agreed with my sentiment that building software faster is happening and might be something to worry about. However, just because someone built the software first doesn't mean it will be successful, because you still have to build a business around it.

This makes sense to me. I think I am worried because I am not a business person, nor do I have those skills-I might not need to have them. But there's another component that I think many developers like myself keep forgetting about: the actual business. Just because you have a solution to a problem, you still need to market it and brand it.

I think I am heading in the right direction with these skills, as I'm learning to brand myself through my personal website and on LinkedIn, but I see the challenge with my numbers fluctuating and realizing how tough it is.

Unfortunately, this invisible speed isn't so invisible-rather, it's visible. But developers need to realize a company is much more than its software. It's an actual brand.