Every day I wake up, check my terminal, and ask myself one question:

Did I ship today?

If the answer is "no", I close my browser tabs, kill my terminal multiplexer, and go sit in a corner to think about my life.

Because here's the thing: Shipping is the only metric that matters.

Not how many blog posts you read.
Not how many Hacker News comments you upvoted.
Not how many tabs you have open titled "how to be more productive."

None of that counts.
The commit log does.

But Wait – Important Exception

Before you rush off to ship something useful, I need you to stop.

Seriously.
Pause everything.

You forgot to rewrite ls in Rust.

That's right. You're not a real developer until you've spent 3 days building a "fast, safe, async-first, zero-cost abstraction" clone of a 50-year-old UNIX utility. Bonus points if you:

  • Call it rusty-ls, rsl, or exa-ng
  • Add a config file in $HOME/.config/rusty-ls/config.toml
  • Implement six color themes, dark mode, and a recursive file tree animation
  • Add fuzzy search, even though it's a listing tool
  • Accidentally break symlink support

And of course, make it blazingly fast™, but never benchmark it. Just say it is.

Real Developers™ Do This

Every real developer has a drawer full of:

  • Ten half-finished side projects
  • Four attempts at rewriting ls
  • A strong opinion on why Electron is both the worst and best thing ever
  • At least one "productivity" CLI tool that no one asked for

You're not shipping unless you're overengineering something nobody needs.
That's how you know it's good.

TL;DR;

Stop reading.
Start shipping.
Unless it's ls in Rust – then definitely read more articles, open 20 tabs, start a rewrite, and never finish it.