Last week I mentioned that I’m building an ECAD app for macOS on the side. One thing I didn’t mention: when I actually do it.
Alarm goes off at 4:40. Make tea, open the MacBook, sit down at the kitchen table. By 5:15 I’m in the code. An hour, sometimes a bit more when things are going well.
Then normal life. Full-time job, home at 4:30, family time. Put the older one to bed, my wife handles the younger one. Completely normal family life with two small kids. Somewhere between 8 and 9 PM things go quiet.
Then the MacBook opens again. Usually on the couch. Until 10 PM, sometimes later.
And that’s been going on since December. Every day, when possible. Which isn’t always.
The most intense moments are when you’re sitting alone at the kitchen table at 5:30 AM and something suddenly works that you’ve been stuck on for days. Autoconnect fires correctly for the first time. The PDF export spits out a clean schematic. And you think: you’re actually insane, man.
But then you look at what’s on the screen. 73,000 lines of code by now, an app that didn’t exist 3 months ago. And you think: yeah okay, but this is awesome.
Here’s the thing: this is my hobby. It completely replaced gaming. Used to be WoW and Diablo, now it’s SwiftUI and Claude Code. Same addictive quality, except something comes out of it in the end.
So no extra stress. That’s what I tell myself anyway. 😅
Martin