My Personal Manifest

The internet was never meant to become a row of toll booths, and I refuse to treat every idea, every line of code and every small experiment as a business opportunity.

Let me be clear about one thing first. I have a job. I run five online education businesses, and they’re how I earn a living. Everything else I build, every side project, tool and experiment, is free to use. When one of those projects matures, it becomes free and open-source software.

It doesn’t start open because my projects change too fast. They grow with me, through my mistakes and whatever I learn along the way, and in the early days the code is a mess I wouldn’t ask anyone to depend on. I also don’t have time to support everything I make. When something feels solid enough, I publish the source and hand it to the community, with no rush and no commercial promises.

They’re free because I believe in an internet that is open, accessible and decentralized. I dislike monopolies and walled gardens, and I’m tired of watching every little tool turn into another monthly subscription. I think the best decisions come from people who build things because they care about them. Spreadsheets are useful, but they’re bad at deciding what’s worth making.

My side projects aren’t there to make money. I build them because I enjoy it and because I’m curious, and building something, however small or strange, is still the best way I know to learn.

The servers come out of my own pocket, paid by the work I do during the day. Donations help now and then and are always welcome, in whatever amount feels fair to whoever sends them, but nobody has to pay to take part.

What I get back is knowledge, experience and a few new friends, plus the freedom to experiment, break things, start over and share what I learned.

I already run companies, and I don’t want my hobbies to become more of them. I don’t want investors deciding where my ideas go either. Some things deserve to exist even if they never make a cent. They don’t need to scale or turn a profit. Being useful is enough, and so is being fun.

If along the way I help make the internet a little freer, it was worth it.