Solving my own needs with code

I remember joining the web development studies as a way to craft something with computers, something that is used worldwide daily. Some of my friends were telling me to join native programming or mobile apps, as I'd be able to build apps for myself, if needed. And I remember thinking:

I can do things for myself on the web, can't I?

I started web development because I liked it back in 2012, I knew that even before writing a single line of code. I'm happy with my current job and I'm working on some side projects at home too. Sometimes I do it to be on the edge checking out new frameworks, features, packages... But most of the time when I write code at home it's for my own use. Don't get me wrong, I also try to help other people with those projects if it's possible.

My biggest project which paid off, without any doubt, is a chatbot I use everyday to know if I'll find a bike in the city bike system I live, in Girona. I was tired of waking up, walking to the bikes station, realising there's not a single one available for me and walking back to the next station, which is not on the same route.

This bot is used by 5 other users and is open to everyone who wants to use it. I'm thinking about talking about it with more people and users I could find on the stations getting a bike.

I also developed a chatbot for getting control about your debts with friends. You only need to add it to the chat group you have with your friends and say @friend owes me 100 or I owe 100 to @friend. The idea came when we wanted to register our debts but couldn't decide which app to use that works for both Android and iOS. We ended up finding an app, but I decided to build this chatbot anyways as an exercise for myself.

Some years ago, I built my own CMS (like a lot of people out there) as an experiment, and it resulted in a pretty neat tool I used to build a few websites with it and even gain some money.

I already mentioned this at the end of this previous post, but Matt Stauffer gave a talk at Laracon Online 2018 about this topic which I found pretty interesting and it encouraged me to continue doing this, for the major good and my own.