Speed Matters
&gt; If I was 10x faster yet it would have been 10 hours. That&#x27;s a long plane ride. Even with a full-time job I would still be able to squeeze in a couple of text editor sized projects every month. I would be able to learn so many new things.<p>I see a dilemma here. Nobody, not even 10x faster than the author, writes a full-fledged text editor in 10 hours. You can create something interesting that does text editing in 10 hours (or 100), but it&#x27;s mostly going to be a learning exercise. You won&#x27;t have created a piece of software that is of any value to anyone but yourself.<p>So the dilemma involves the tension between rapidly speeding through many interesting &quot;efforts&quot; that result in nothing of any use to anyone, but lots of learning value to the programmer; or spending much, much more time creating software that is genuinely useful to people who are not programmers, but risking getting stuck in a given language, problem domain or project and not learning as much.<p>I made my bed - I opted for 21+ years focused on a single project, but I was lucky in that it spanned everything from kernel-side stuff to hard-realtime to UX and I felt I&#x27;m still learning new stuff even today.