Timothée Bourguignon

How is Miguel Piedrafita, 19 years old indie maker, learning and creating? (DevJourney #146)

Tim Bourguignon -


This week, I published Miguel Piedrafita's #DevJourney story on my eponym Podcast: Software developer's Journey. Among many other things, here are my main personal takeaways:

  • Miguel's story starts in his "technology class" in high school. The teacher showed the students how to program in HTML. Miguel (like I did at his age) had played with the C-language but never really found how to use it. Not needing anything else than a web browser to program in HTML convinced Miguel. He then started a long journey of "right-click & view-source," reverse-engineering the websites which came across his path. As he put it, he "went line by line, commenting them out and seeing what happens." This is what we talk about when we talk about "developer inner-loop," the fastest feedback possible!
  • Miguel is project-driven. He acquires new skills to realize ideas. And he seeks ideas to acquire new skills. This is how he gathered such a long projects list in such a short timeframe.
  • I asked Miguel how he manages to finish all those projects. His answer was very humbling and along the line of "I play with a lot of stuff, this is only the tip of the iceberg, I start way more projects." And Miguel later added that he chooses projects that take him out of his comfort zone for one aspect of it. That's where he learns the most.
  • Miguel submitted many pull requests to Laravel. To gain the confidence and knowledge to do it, he reviewed every pull request. That's how he eventually came to creating the widely used @auth directive in Laravel.
  • Being - not even a yet - a student, Miguel can be very relaxed about making money with his services. Nevertheless, he is making money. His small services are solving real problems, and if none of them is making millions, it still adds up to something. I love the grit.

Advice:

  • Find a community of Indie-Makers to support you, help you and keep you accountable

Quotes:

  • "I was the type of kids who, when they see a button, have to try pressing it and see what breaks"
  • "I decided to make this project open-source because it was my second PHP App and first Laravel App; my code was probably going to be awful; I wanted people to be able to tell me how to make it better."
  • "You know how everyone says 'don't implement your own crypto?', well I did just that"

Thanks, Miguel, for sharing your story with us!

You can find the full episode and the show notes on devjourney.info.

Did you listen to his story?

  • What did you learn?
  • What are your personal takeaways?
  • What did you find particularly interesting?