I’ve built a Q&A platform where the worst answers win. It’s called AskBad and it’s exactly what it sounds like.
Look, we’ve already got Quora, StackOverflow, Reddit, and a dozen other places to ask questions and get helpful, well-researched answers from knowledgeable people. The internet is drowning in good advice. What we’re clearly missing is a dedicated space for absolutely terrible guidance.
AskBad started as a satirical reverse StackOverflow. You know those answers on Stack Overflow that make you question whether the person has ever touched a computer? Imagine a whole platform celebrating those. The worse your answer, the more upvotes you get. You earn negative karma. There are badges for being spectacularly unhelpful.
I have had more ideas than I can count. A notes folder full of app concepts, half-baked prototypes in forgotten repos, domain names I bought in a fit of optimism at 2am. Over a decade of this. Life gets in the way. Work gets in the way. Kids, mortgages, health, relationships, fatigue. The ideas pile up and the backlog grows.
If you look at my GitHub, you might think I ship a lot. Nearly 200 repositories. Aurelia plugins, blockchain games, CLI tools, a regex battle game, apps for finance tracking and tattoo previews and bedtime stories. From the outside it probably looks prolific. But I know what is missing. The projects that never left my head. The code that never got written. The things I talked about for years and never touched.
I get asked this question a lot. Usually with a tone somewhere between genuine curiosity and thinly veiled accusation. Where do you find the time? You have a full time job. You have kids. You have a wife. You have this blog. You have side projects. You take on contracting work. You contribute to open source. When do you sleep? Are you okay? Is this a cry for help?
The honest answer is that I have an incredibly understanding wife.
I learned early that a day job will keep you busy, but it will not always stretch you. If you want to move forward, you have to put in reps outside the clock. Not forever, not at the cost of your life, but long enough and often enough to build range.
I started in an agency. Fast pace, many clients, constant context switching. I worked late nights and some weekends because I wanted to get better. That is not a long term lifestyle and I do not recommend burning yourself out, but those seasons taught me how to ship, how to debug under pressure, and how to own the result. They also taught me to set better boundaries later. You can hold both truths: growth often requires extra effort, and health requires rest.