This developer makes $200,000/month. (Yep, you read that right)
And yet, he writes SHITTY code.
If you're a developer, you've probably heard of Pieter Levels.
He gets bashed on X for embracing his "dirty" code:
→ Deploys directly to production from his personal machine
→ Codes all projects in PHP (in one file)
→ Uses only jQuery for the front-end
→ All commits say "x"
But:
→ Handles 200M requests per month
→ Pushes 100+ times a day
→ Makes $200k+ per month
→ Has 500k+ followers
He builds in public on X, where he regularly faces angry, skeptical developers who cry scandal over his practices.
But Pieter doesn’t care what other developers think.
Why?
→ While they debate architecture, he's converting clients.
→ While they optimize code endlessly, he's optimizing his business.
→ While they polish code, he's improving marketing.
If you're a developer, your focus should be on sales and marketing.
Stop being in love with your code.
Code is just a tool for the business, not the other way around.
It helps you make more money, not feed your developer ego.
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I would not recommend doing this in a team unless you want to be kicked out 🙃. Enterprise level applications or long term projects will never scale in such a manner .
Freelance Senior Web & Mobile Developer | Node.js, Flutter, React, Next.js, Firebase, Angular
5 months ago
So basically you're saying: while you're making money, anything else matters right? Well I don't think so..
Prioritise always and only the more money the better has driven us where we are. A world where a LOT of people have power and visibility being clearly stupid, where people underestimate or directly deride education and taking time to learn deep about something because "they can make money without all of that", where people "seriously" argue about flat earth or conspiracy about vaccines...
Well, no. The fact that you can make money doing something wrong doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it better or even improve at that. Constantly there are niches where, for different reasons, you can make a lot of money at least for a while, but it's a matter of time that you get competitors, or the hype is gone, or users start to need something more complex and ideally you try to improve to offer them the best..
I think we should never idealise this way of doing things, even if they can work for a while.. we're supposed to be evolving and progressing, as individuals and as a civilization, and this is totally the opposite