It’s not talent, discipline, or the perfect IDE it’s something far stranger.
Think about this: according to GitHub, there are over 100 million developers worldwide right now. And yet, fewer than 1% of them will ever build something you’ve actually heard of.
Why? Well, it’s not because the other 99% aren’t smart. It’s not because they didn’t grind LeetCode or memorize Vim motions. It’s because skill alone doesn’t explain who actually ships.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the frameworks, the IDE, the shiny new AI assistant? None of that makes you great. If tools made legends, every engineer with Cursor installed would be Evan You by now.
But they’re not.
The real cheat code is obsession.
Not motivation. Not discipline. Obsession.
And here’s the kicker: obsession doesn’t feel like work. It feels like play. It’s the 2 a.m. bug fix that somehow wakes you up more than caffeine. It’s forgetting to eat lunch because you’re still tweaking that shader effect. It’s treating a “vacation” as an excuse to stay home and build something weird. That’s what makes cracked developers look like wizards to everyone else when really, they’ve just logged thousands of joyful hours where the rest of us tapped out.
And here’s the twist: obsession comes in two flavors.
- Product obsession → you love what you’re building so much that the tech is just a tool.
- Tech obsession → you bend frameworks and runtimes until they surrender.
Both paths lead to the same place. Obsession is the only cheat code in programming.
The myth of the magical stack
Every developer I know has fallen for this lie:
“If I just find the perfect stack, I’ll finally get good.”
So you spend hours setting up your IDE, arguing about frameworks, or installing the latest AI plugin that promises to turn you into a 10x engineer.
Cursor is “the new Copilot killer.” NeoVim will make you a coding monk. JetBrains? “Productivity unlocked.”
And yet GitHub tells us most repos still die unfinished.
Your dotfiles may look like a spaceship, but ~/dev/unfinished is still full of graveyards.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: tools don’t make you cracked. Obsession does.
Look at game dev. You can binge seven hours of Unity tutorials and never ship a single playable demo. Meanwhile, someone obsessed enough to hack Lua in a weekend ships a working prototype by Monday.
I’ve been there. One night I spent hours configuring tmux panes and polishing my Zsh prompt until it looked like a neon cockpit. It felt productive… but the project I wanted to build? It never left disk.
That’s the real trap: mistaking setup for progress.
And it gets worse. Tools give you the illusion of mastery. But obsession with outcomes is what actually compounds.
Here’s the breakdown:
Stack-obsession → clean configs, polished setups, no shipped product.
Outcome-obsession → messy code, hacked prototypes, finished projects.
That’s why the devs who change the game don’t argue about keybindings. They obsess over outcomes until the rest of us can’t ignore what they’ve shipped.
Table: stack obsession vs outcome obsession
So yeah, buy the new IDE, tweak the dotfiles but don’t confuse setup time for progress. Obsession with outcomes is what actually builds cracked developers.
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Obsession With the Product (The Balatro Story)
If you want proof that obsession trumps everything else, look no further than Balatro.
In February 2024, a Canadian solo developer named LocalThunk dropped a poker-themed roguelike deck-builder built not in Unreal or Unity, but in Lua with the lightweight Love2D framework. (Wikipedia, Balatro)
On paper, this shouldn’t have worked. Lua is usually the punchline of Roblox memes. Love2D isn’t exactly AAA-engine material. And yet, within its first month, Balatro sold over 1 million copies. By early 2025, it had crossed 5 million. (The Verge)
The code? Not perfect. Developers on Reddit roasted it. But while studios with 200-person teams pushed out games bloated with day-one patches, one obsessed dev shipped something polished, fun, and finished.
That’s what product-obsession looks like:
- You care more about features and fun than frameworks.
- You learn tech only to make your vision real.
- You’d keep building even if no one else played.
Balatro wasn’t powered by a magical stack. It was powered by obsession the kind that makes vacation feel like an excuse to stay home and code.
function love.update(dt)
player.x = player.x + player.speed * dt
end
function love.draw()
love.graphics.print("obsession > tutorials", 10, 10)
end
(This tiny Love2D loop moves a player across the screen and prints “obsession > tutorials” proof that even the simplest code can ship something real.)
Simple. Playful. Enough to turn obsession into shipped product.
Obsession With the Tech (Evan You’s Story)
Not every obsession is about the end product. Some devs get obsessed with the tools themselves and that obsession changes everything for the rest of us.
Take Evan You. Back when he worked at Google, he loved parts of Angular but hated the bloat. Most of us would complain on Reddit, maybe file a bug. Evan did the obsessive thing: he built his own framework, Vue.js.
What started as a side project is now one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks on the planet powering everything from Alibaba’s front end to indie apps worldwide.
But he didn’t stop. Evan kept scratching his itch with tooling. When bundlers felt slow and clunky, he built Vite a lightning-fast development server and build tool. It spread so fast that even React’s official docs now recommend Vite over Create React App.
That’s what tech-obsession looks like: refusing to live with pain in the stack, and shipping something cleaner instead of just ranting about it.
Here’s the before-and-after:
Mini example:
# Old way (CRA)
npx create-react-app myapp
# Modern way (Vite)
npm create vite@latest myapp
(This shows why Vite felt revolutionary it replaced a heavy, slow starter with a command that felt instant.)
The first feels like dragging a boulder, the second like snapping Legos. That’s what tech-obsession looks like: seeing pain in the stack, refusing to accept it, and shipping something cleaner.
Obsession vs motivation hacks
Here’s the thing nobody on LinkedIn grind-culture posts will tell you: motivation is caffeine. Obsession is oxygen.
Motivation is what gets you to crack open LeetCode for a week before burning out. Obsession is what keeps you debugging shaders at 3 a.m. without noticing the clock. Motivation needs playlists, planners, and productivity hacks. Obsession just happens you don’t need to trick yourself into working because you’d be doing it anyway.
Think about it like gaming. You don’t need a “discipline system” to play Elden Ring until sunrise you’re hooked. Obsession is the same force, but applied to code. And unlike motivation, it scales. Obsession turns hard work into play, and playtime compounds into skill. That’s how cracked developers are born.
I learned this the hard way. Back when I was messing around with a side project a tiny Discord bot nobody asked for I stayed up until 5 a.m. rewriting the command parser three different times. Not because I had a deadline, or a roadmap, or even a real audience. Just because I couldn’t stop thinking about how to make it cleaner. Months later, that bot taught me more about async patterns than any tutorial ever did.
That’s the difference. Motivation burns out. Obsession compounds.
So if you find yourself working deep into the night without realizing it, that’s not burnout it’s a sign you’ve found the thing worth obsessing over.
Excuses devs make (and why they’re fake)
Developers are pros at making excuses. I’ve made them, you’ve made them, we’ve all been there. The two most common ones?
Excuse 1: “This tech won’t get me hired.”
Translation: “I’ll only learn things that look good on a résumé.” The problem? Half the tools recruiters drooled over five years ago are irrelevant today. No one’s asking for Backbone.js anymore. Skills compound even if the tech fades. If you get obsessed with making, you’ll learn transferable problem-solving skills.
Excuse 2: “This already exists, why build it?”
If Linus Torvalds had that attitude, Linux wouldn’t exist. By the early ’90s, plenty of operating systems were already around. He built one anyway because he was obsessed. Now Linux quietly powers everything from Android to the servers behind your favorite memes.
The truth: there will always be neckbeards on Reddit ready to roast your code quality, your stack choices, or your “reinventing the wheel.” But here’s the scoreboard: shippers > critics.
Mini-table: excuses vs realities
Excuses are fear in disguise. And fear keeps you average. Obsession ignores excuses entirely it just builds.
How to channel obsession without burning out
Obsession is fuel, but without direction it burns you out. Every dev knows that “one more bug fix” night that turns into unpaid crunch. The trick isn’t to kill obsession it’s to steer it.
Rule #1: build something you’d use. Local Funk didn’t run market research before Bolatro. He just thought it was fun. Same with Evan You: Vue wasn’t made for a job listing, it solved his Angular pain.
Rule #2: scope small. Obsession compounds faster on projects you can finish. Prototype in Lua. Build a Discord bot. Ship a tiny Chrome extension. Finished beats “big idea” graveyards every time.
Rule #3: treat coding like meditation. If it feels like punishment, stop. Obsession should recharge you, not drain you.
Checklist: 3 guardrails for obsession
- ✅ Projects you’d personally use
- ✅ Small scope, ship often
- ✅ Process framed as play, not labor
Obsession is the engine but even engines need a steering wheel.
Community
Obsession doesn’t mean locking yourself in a cave with Vim and energy drinks. The best developers use community as a multiplier. Shipping a side project on GitHub? You’ll get feedback, bug reports, and probably a few sarcastic comments about your variable names. Posting progress on Reddit or Discord? You’ll get roasted, sure but also motivated. That loop of building → sharing → getting dunked on → improving is rocket fuel.
GitHub reports ~90% of repos never see a second commit proof that dabbling kills momentum, while obsession keeps projects alive.
Think about it: most of the memes we laugh at daily merge conflict disasters, npm install breaking everything, tabs vs spaces exist because thousands of devs are sharing the same pain points. Memes aren’t just jokes; they’re signals that you’re not alone in the obsession grind.
When you share your work, you’re tapping into that same meme economy. The critics will come, but so will the people who get inspired. Every repo star, every Discord ping, every “hey this actually helped me” is reinforcement that keeps obsession alive.
Obsession grows in private, but it’s sustained in public. Code in solitude, sure but don’t forget to throw your work into the meme pit. That’s where it levels up.
What obsession looks like in practice
So how do you know if you’re obsessed or just dabbling? Here’s the cheat sheet:
Decision matrix: product vs tech vs dabbling
A few years ago, I was deep in “dabbling.” Polished configs, zero finished work. The switch came when I forced myself to pick one project I actually needed (a browser extension for work) and finish it. Shipping once taught me more than months of tutorial hopping.
That’s the litmus test: are you coding because you want a job bullet point, or because you literally can’t stop building? The former burns out. The latter compounds into cracked skill.
Pick a side. Dabbling won’t get you there.
Conclusion
Cracked developers aren’t born. They’re built.
And the raw material isn’t talent, luck, or the latest IDE it’s obsession.
That’s the throughline from Balatro, hacked together in Lua and shipped to millions, to Evan You, who turned frustration with Angular into Vue and Vite, to Linus, who built Linux when the world already had plenty of operating systems.
Obsession is what makes the hours disappear, what makes side projects turn into frameworks, and what makes “unfinished” folders turn into tools the rest of us can’t live without.
If you’re not obsessed, you’re rent-coding. Clocking in, copying patterns, shipping tickets. You’ll stay average.
But if you are? If you’re obsessed with the product or obsessed with the tech? Then you’ll put in hours that don’t feel like hours — and that compounds into mastery.
Here’s the free test:
Would you still build this if nobody paid you, nobody noticed, and nobody cared?
If the answer is yes you’ve found it. That’s your obsession.
Now build it. Share it. Meme it. Because obsession is contagious. And the next Linux, the next Vue, the next Balatro? It won’t come from a job posting.
It’ll come from someone too obsessed to stop.
What’s the one project you’d keep building even if nobody paid or noticed? Drop it in the comments. I want to see your obsession.”
Helpful resources
- Evan You → Vue | Vite | React + Vite
- Linux → Kernel archive | 1991 hobby post
- Communities → Reddit | Hacker News
- Boot.dev → Courses
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