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Cover: a piece I made with my son.
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This week, on a call, I accidentally invented a word.
I recently joined a
mentorship program
for engineers who build great things but stay invisible.
It's run by
Fran Méndez, 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
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
about
API design. 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. 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". 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.
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| 1 Bd des clubs - CFC, 20200 Casablanca, Morocco
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