Building the tech instead of building the product
published on 2022/04/05
There's an old mantra in game development: "Don't make a game engine, make a game." - Confucius, 1337 A.D.
It's a wise saying, because we game developers have so much fun making the underlying foundations, that we never get around to adding the actual gameplay. Verdagon
Game development culture has a distinct culture in that its developers are incline to make tools. We don't see this as much in web development culture. We do have brilliant people inventing technologies, especially right now in the JavaScript space, but the ratio seems to be much higher in games. Most of web development culture is about adopting instead of inventing.
Building tools is fun - the challenge is maintaining them. For those that could do both sustainably have the potential to reap the productivity reward from having tools that are optimized for their workflow.