---
type: "article"
title: "Dropamine: the little hit I get every time I quit"
newsletter: "The Weekly Interface"
newsletter_handle: "the-weekly-interface"
newsletter_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/the-weekly-interface"
author: "Samir Amzani (@samz)"
published: "2026-09-23T14:06:24.139Z"
canonical_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/the-weekly-interface/a/QCXw6kQ7"
markdown_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/the-weekly-interface/a/QCXw6kQ7.md"
chat_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/the-weekly-interface/a/QCXw6kQ7/chat"
body_source: "native"
likes: 5
replies: 10
body_words: 1149
---

# Dropamine: the little hit I get every time I quit

![Cover: a piece I made with my son. ](https://fmxorstnlyoqpqdftivs.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/article-images/ce4dc54b-7510-4b7c-8a4f-2f24438a73bb/2d4b65d1-14df-42f5-a0d6-f2a4d65a904a/1790114587451-8s97a63b.jpg)

This week, on a call, I accidentally invented a word.

I recently joined a [mentorship program](https://fmvilas.kit.com/products/unrejectable) for engineers who build great things but stay invisible. It's run by [Fran Méndez](https://usecommune.com/@fmvilas), the creator of AsyncAPI, and there are eight of us, all with some version of the same problem. On the first call, while explaining my version of it, the word just came out.

**Dropamine**. From "drop."

Everyone knows dopamine, the reward chemical. **Dropamine** is the reward you get when you quietly abandon a project. There are no more follow-ups to send, no more promoting yourself, no more asking people to try your idea or product. There is just silence, and the silence feels like relief.

I have been living on that hit for twenty years, and I can prove it.

It started before the internet reached my life. In the 90s, when I was a teenager in Morocco, I was one of the very few people in my entire [hometown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agadir) who knew how to fix computers. And I only knew because I had accidentally broken my own first computer and had to figure out how to repair it, alone, with no internet to ask. That accident became a skill, and the skill brought me business I never asked for. People just showed up with their broken machines. I never advertised anything. I never had to.

In 2004 I built my first real app, a rental manager for a holiday home owner in Corsica. It generated the PDF contracts, handled check-ins and check-outs, and kept the booking calendar. It worked, and she used it for years. I never sold it to anyone else.

Later I built a boat rental app in Corsica as well. It had one user, and I kept a dream in my head that one day more customers would pay for it.

I co-wrote a book with [Andrzej](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrzej-jarzyna/) about [API design](https://a.co/d/09KfzEdx). I did the launch week, talked about it in a few conferences and then nothing. The funny thing is that the book keeps working without me. Even today it brings me advisory requests from people who found it on their own, and I turn most of them down because my main gig takes all my time. That's how little promotion I did: the only doors it opens are the ones it opens by itself.

I started a newsletter about APIs. You can guess how that went.

And that's only the subset that ever left my localhost. Behind it sit a dozen other projects that never made it out of my machine or my private GitHub. Tools that worked, that I used every day, that nobody else ever saw. My wife has a joke about it now. Every time I open my laptop with a certain look on my face, she asks me if this is another app. And of course, AI code generation made the whole thing worse. Building has never been this cheap, so now I can start, finish, and drop a project in a single weekend.

For years I told myself the usual story, that I just don't finish things. But look at the list again. Everything got built. The book got written. Some apps shipped. I finish the technical part every single time. The drop always happens at the same moment, when the work stops being technical and becomes social: promoting, following up, repeating myself in public for the fifth time. That is where I disappear.

Now I understand where the pattern comes from. My very first experience of work taught me that customers appear on their own if you are good enough. In my hometown in the 90s that was actually true, because I was one of the only people who could do the thing.

The same trick worked at my first real job. In 2007 I joined WMaker, an early SaaS company, and I simply became the guy for the hard problems. The team page described me, in French, as "le killer des fonctionnalités vidéo", the killer of video features, the one adapting the app to the Japanese and Arabic markets, the one who designed the plugin architecture and the APIs that opened the platform to developers. That page is [still online today](https://www.wmaker.net/Samir-Amzani_a37.html). I never wrote a single line about myself. Someone else did, because inside those walls I was scarce.

So I doubled down on the strategy that was working. I made APIs my specialty and spent the next fifteen years pushing that one skill through every domain and every scale I could find: sports, video, e-commerce, developer tools, from writing the implementation to setting the strategy and the vision. Whenever I felt the ceiling coming, I didn't get louder. I got deeper.

**Cal Newport** wrote a famous book called "[*So Good They Can't Ignore You*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38478222-so-good-they-can-t-ignore-you)*"*. Without knowing it, that was my entire career strategy. And here is what I got wrong: I mastered the "**so good**" part and assumed the "**they can't ignore you**" part would take care of itself. It did, for years, but only because scarcity was doing my marketing for free. In a small hometown, in a small company, being good is enough to be seen. On the internet, among millions of good engineers, it is not. The skill stopped being rare a long time ago. My strategy never got the update.

So it is not laziness. It is an escape from being visible, and it hides very well, because it always looks like something positive: a new idea. Starting something new feels like ambition. Nobody notices that it is actually a retreat. I didn't notice it myself for twenty years.

This newsletter is me fixing that, in public. Every week I will write about the things I actually work on and think about. APIs, developer experience, AI, MCP and engineering in general, but also the other things: raising a teenager, living between Morocco and Europe, philosophy, art. The things engineers think about but rarely write down.

One more thing, and this part is a deal between you and me. If this newsletter goes quiet, I am not "busy." That is **dropamine**. You know the word now. Use it on me.

If you see yourself in this, if you have a pile of projects you built but never published, or a partner with their own version of the "another app" joke, hit reply and tell me what you built and dropped. I read everything, and honestly, the replies might become issue #2.

See you next week. It's the first time I actually mean that.

Sam

***

*P.S. If you came from ****Pragmatic API ***newsletter*, yes, it is moving into this one. You'll get the same API depth when the topic asks for it, but with the rest of me included this time. And yes, you noticed it went quiet too. Now you know the word for that.*

***

## Discussion (10 replies)

Numbering shows the reply tree: `2.1` is a reply to `2`. Message text is reproduced verbatim as posted.

### 1. Fran Mendez (@fmvilas) - 2026-09-23T15:21:08.462Z

> Building has never been this cheap, so
>  now I can start, finish, and drop a project in a single
>  weekend.

LOL, that's true 🤣

### 2. Fran Mendez (@fmvilas) - 2026-09-23T15:25:51.705Z

Welcome to Commune mate 🤘

### 3. Nicolas Dréno (@ndreno) - 2026-09-24T15:37:31.576Z

coucou :)

### 4. Samir Amzani (@samz) - 2026-09-24T18:08:19.711Z

Hey @ndreno - good to see you here

### 5. Kin Lane (@kinlane) - 2026-09-24T19:40:19.812Z

I dropped two while reading this!!

### 6. Samir Amzani (@samz) - 2026-09-25T07:56:59.524Z

@kinlane Haha better that me! I dropped 3 times while writing it

### 7. Fran Mendez (@fmvilas) - 2026-09-25T09:11:26.180Z

Suddenly **Dropamine** got a whole new meaning 🤣

### 8. Steven Willmott (@njyx) - 2026-09-26T21:36:08.095Z

My proposal for the opposite and complementary high: startamine. This is an additive substance that you later need to compensate for with dropamine...

### 9. Emek Taydaş (@mithgroth) - 2026-09-28T09:58:35.608Z

I'm in this picture, and... I like it.

- Attachment (image): https://fmxorstnlyoqpqdftivs.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/post-media/fYZCYoOCMXu8pCRfmnVCiVOgLdVkLMnu/1790589514810-vbc75g.webp

### 10. Samir Amzani (@samz) - 2026-09-28T11:45:29.744Z

Haha love it @mithgroth! I should paint that and put it on my wall