I did try once. We're building tools for others to use. So there's no way you will build it alone. You have to have contacts with your future users. Staying alone is bad for your mental health and bad for your product development. Just don't.

Let me give you a rather angry story.

My network team asked me to deploy an open-source project on the security VM host. I thought it was a good idea. Small project, no wiki page, poor documentation. Still, I got it up and running. From my side, it looked configured correctly. Their plate was full with bigger priorities, so I didn’t push. My job as the security guy was just: install the app, give them creds, let them configure. Mission accomplished. But of course, I’m always around to help friends.

Months go by and the project sits untouched. Then, one Friday, in a meeting, they accuse me of failing to configure the app. Threw it right in my face. I had no use for the project. It’s a network tool, no security features, written in a language I don’t even know. I only installed it because they asked. If it were for me; I’d never have bothered. I thought I was being helpful. Apparently, not helpful enough.

So I decided: fine, I’ll code my own. No equivalent project exists in Python, so I started from scratch. That way, I could even extend it to do something useful for security as well. I quietly took the nonfunctional project offline. Hindsight is 20/20: the problem wasn’t with the software, it was with their missed network config. Nobody noticed it was gone for weeks anyway.

Over the next couple of weeks, I built a replacement. From scratch. Based on the demo of the original project, I matched and exceeded what it could do. And it worked.

I shared it with the team. Crickets. No feedback. No “nice job.” Just one question: what happened to the old project? I told them the VM was offline and could be spun back up easily. They didn’t ask me to bring it back online. They were still buried in more important work.

Meanwhile, I kept polishing my tool. Now that I had a good minimally viable product, I sought out feedback, I implemented 100% of their ideas, all good ideas. I added security extensions. Performance upgrades, WOOT NumPy and pandas dataframes.

Then last Friday, my boss corners me. The network team says my tool “isn’t functional.” News to me. I’d never been told of any problems. It was running fine from where I sat. Now suddenly, they “urgently” need the original back up.

So yesterday, I drag the old project back online. Tons of work on my part. During setup, the blame game starts. Firewall, config, etc. They even ask me to reinstall the OS because apparently when I installed the “documentation was not followed.” After a full reinstall of os, I hand over the vm, the same problem is still there. Finally, they discover it was a router config issue on their side.

Now the old project is alive, working, and I’m left staring at it, wondering: why isn’t my project good enough? why the bad mouthing me to my boss? when im just trying to be helpful.