Why I'm writing software again after selling my company

I started my career as a developer out of university. I understood it, enjoyed it, and worked to get better at it. Eventually, I had made enough mistakes and put in the time to build a point-of-sale and inventory system from scratch. I ran it as the co-founder and CEO for over 5 years.

But in the tail end of my career at Greenline POS, I was not writing code at all. I would jump in for select features or bug fixes here and there, but I understood that my biggest contribution was not writing code, but building the business and getting customers.

I wondered if I would ever write code again.

After I left BLAZE, the acquiring company, I took a few months to rest. I drove across Canada and back via the US. During that time of reflection, I realized that it was very likely I might never build something as big as what I had built before.

Building a business requires the perfect mix of timing, luck, and skills. That mix is not always there. There have been countless entrepreneurs throughout history who beat themselves up over feeling like they’ve peaked. Thankfully, I didn’t feel that. I decided that it was enough to build things I like, ideally with people I like. That’s it. I stopped overthinking.

Naturally, I gravitated towards writing code again. Saw the fun in it.

What initially motivated me was that LLMs were so powerful, so cheap, but most importantly, so easy to use for developers. I was particularly interested in structuring the vast amounts of unstructured data out there. I wanted to better understand the city I lived in, so I decided to spend my time scraping city rezoning and development updates and running LLMs on them to get structured data that could be further analyzed. I was downloading PDFs, running them through text extraction libraries or OCR services, then running the text through LLMs to ask about the type and size of development, applicant, relevant dates, etc.

I joined a local company with a cool team, Spark, to develop a new real estate analytics platform that specifically makes data like this easier to browse for real estate developers and agents.

Even with a full-time job, I find myself toiling away most nights trying out new frameworks, making my code better, and spinning up new projects to test myself.

Learned to deploy infrastructure with Terraform. Became a monorepo maximalist. Typescript enthusiast. Fell in love with Astro. Built another small inventory management system from scratch just to see that I still had it in me.

It’s safe to say that coding never went away for me. I feel reinvigorated somehow. I think a big part of it is that LLMs can help you learn new things so quickly. Not knowing something used to be a bottleneck; now that bottleneck does not exist. The other is the incredible feeling you get being able to control software to do your bidding. There’s a strong sense of agency with it that’s hard to get elsewhere.

I’m happy to label myself as a nerd who will probably enjoy writing software until the end of days. And I’m happy about that. This is something I can live with. And when the next big opportunity arrives, I’ll be ready.