What's the point in life if you don't get to work on what you find interesting. Those Yaks ain't going to shave themselves you know.

Nothing wrong with having a nice yak wool coat

Hey, all I want to do is shave yaks, and now you want a coat?

That will involve sorting, carding/combing, spinning, weaving/knitting, and all sorts of other stuff that doesn’t involve razor blades and yaks.

Sometimes all you have to do is shave the yak and give the wool away, and a nice yak-wool coat will come back to you. :)

Which is to say: sometimes, if you build a low-level library/infrastructure service and release it, someone else will take advantage of it to write the high-level thing you were originally aiming to create.

I'm speaking from experience — my company's DBaaS is built on the premise of just building a really good database domain-model to hold a certain type of large, public-available datasets, for efficient, flexible querying of them; loading those datasets into it; and then giving people access to it (through SQL or various use-case-shaped APIs.) It's a really thorough yak-shave of the DB+ETL layer of what was originally planned to be a higher-level B2C product.

But it turns out I have a pretty unique view of what should be considered "fun", because my yak-shave was everyone else's schlep. Everyone turned out to be dying to get their hands on this thing, because they wanted to spend all their time on a product, rather than getting good data to feed their product. Once we realized that, we stopped trying to build a B2C product at all, and just started selling the yak wool directly.

I never thought about the implication that shaving a yak is the most fun thing you want to do all day. It's so great you would rather shun all your other responsibilities to shave some yaks. I guess I'd better try it.

I really depends on the species of yak. Shave your matted, smelly yak? No thank you! But my silky black yak, absolutely!

I guess the trick is to fall in love with a species of yak that everyone else needs but wants to avoid, so they'll pay you to shave your favorite yaks.

The real yak was the PHP we wrote along the way?

> People get into game development because they want to have fun programming

Totally agree. I think the only real issue here is expectations. If the project mentioned was crowdfunded specifically and only with the goal to deliver a game, then I think people would be right to be a little bit irked that the developer is instead tinkering with their own programming language rather than the game, after eight full years. However if the project was funded with the understanding that the developer was just going to explore and share the process of game development and everyone is on board with them going off-piste to develop something interesting, then I guess that's fine.

That said, the amount of money in question is $67k spread over 1660 backers (~$40 each) so it's not like this person has grifted millions then done a rug-pull :)

I don't know about other backers, but I'm happy with how this has turned out myself. I think backing anything comes with a level of risk, and the fact that they're working on something publicly, eight years later, is more than a lot of campaigns manage.

Thank you. It's not a grift (or is that what a grifter would say - oh god I hope it isn't). I didn't want us to overpromise and become the next No Man's Sky (which has by now fully redeemed itself) so I never spent much time on advertising and trailers. As a result, we didn't get much money. People were skeptical from the beginning, which was expected. What we got in support largely came from a handful of friends who wanted to see it done, and most of their names are going to end up in the credit roll. 99% of our present funding comes out of our own pockets and from Sylvia's illustration business.

To clarify, I was trying to say that it doesn't sound like a grift. The last sentence of my comment was badly worded :)

> I've noticed this in many hobby professions - eg. hobby woodworkers spending more time on creating workbenches/tools/jigs/sleds than actually building some projects

As a hobby woodworker, I was saved from this by circumstances: I couldn't build a workbench in the old shed, I couldn't build a new shed at the time, but I needed a new nighstand ASAP because my son needed a larger bed, so I had to make it on an old kitchen table in the old shed.

That is absolutely fine, and you can learn a lot with that sort of approach. It really depends on your objective.

The only thing to keep in mind is that writing software for business (e.g. SaaS) requires the exact opposite approach. You go lean, write what other people want, and go for an MVP first.

In my first year of 3D printing, I printed mostly parts about upgrading and modding my 3D printer.

But the good thing is it also made me get used to the whole process of refining a 3D print and after a year I barely started to print functional&useful things.

So yeah, I don't see a problem with this approach :)

I'm somewhat guilty of this when working on a desktop app. I made a state management library, though I realized I cannot possibly finish it in full so I spent only 100h on it to get it minimally working. I don't consider it a waste though. The waste was trying to come up with some kind of strict error handling ala Rust in TypeScript, I went far with this and got an idea to do it with minimal development, thankfully I pulled the plug on this after a month and went back to work.

As a solo bootstrapper founder it's really hard to do development and business / marketing in the early stages. Focusing purely on development is preferable when time limited, however, I think it's sometimes helpful to stop development and take a break to spend on business / marketing - i.e. some education, or preparing marketing content for the future. This tends to put in perspective how much time sometimes is wasted on meaningless things and gives clarity on what is really important - shipping a quality product.

> But not like creating a typesetting system to use to write your book.

I sort of did this once because I wanted both PDF (via LaTeX) and HTML output.