Things I Built While Figuring Out What Kind of Engineer I Want to Become

I Don't Want to Be Known for Knowing Technologies

I've been thinking about something recently.

As an IT student, it's easy to look at what other developers are doing and feel like you need to know everything.

React.

Next.js.

Flutter.

Kotlin.

AI.

IoT.

Cloud.

Databases.

And then another framework appears.

So I started asking myself a different question:

What do I actually want people to remember me for?

I don't have a perfect answer yet.

But I think my projects are starting to give me one.

I'm calling this series "Things I Built While Figuring Out What Kind of Engineer I Want to Become."

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1. subukAn: The Project I Haven't Built Yet

This might sound like a strange project to start with.

I haven't actually built the application.

And that's intentional.

subukAn is my idea for a user-testing platform for the Filipino tech community.

The idea is that developers can pay real testers to evaluate their applications against specific tasks, while testers earn money for completing those tasks.

My first instinct was to build it.

Then I stopped.

I realized I could spend weeks building authentication, dashboards, payments, databases and APIs without knowing whether the basic idea worked.

So version 0.1 is currently a planning and validation phase.

I'm trying to answer questions before writing the code.

Would developers pay for this?

Would testers participate?

How should tasks be priced?

What happens when a tester rejects a task?

How should disputes work?

That's probably one of the most useful things I've learned recently:

Coding isn't always the first step.

Sometimes the first step is finding out what you don't know.

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