The calculator I built and barely use
I built a French Press Calculator a while back because it turns out doing math before caffeine felt insurmountable. And it works! If I’m being generous (I am), I use it maybe twice a month. Most mornings I just eyeball it or have already set the drip the night before. It turns out that building the thing and actually making it part of my routine are two completely different problems to solve. The first one was really fun, I had a million ideas and enhancements and add-ons I wanted to make, but the second one was (and still is) boring and ongoing and arguably the only one that matters once the proverbial sawdust settles and the end result is just sitting there in front of you.
I do this constantly. My notes app has an embarrassingly long list of project ideas when compared to my list of completed projects, and the list gets much shorter when I look at “things I actually use consistently.”
This isn’t just a side project problem
In one of my more reflective states of mind, I realized I’ve seen this scenario play out at most every company I’ve worked at. The exciting part is always the evaluation, the implementation, the launch. Six months later? The data is a mess, half the team found workarounds, and leadership is asking whether we should evaluate a new tool to solve a problem the current one handles fine, if anyone had spent time maintaining it instead of chasing the next shiny thing.
I’ve previously written about discovering a rogue email platform at a former company. The team that used it wasn’t doing anything wrong, per se. They needed a tool, found one, and made it work. The problem wasn’t that the platform existed, but that nobody maintained it, documented it, or bothered to ask whether it still made sense three years later. By the time I found it, the shared login had been passed through four people and the segment logic lived entirely in one person’s head. Not to mention we had a full-fledged marketing automation platform the rest of the company used and managed.
That’s what happens when you only fund the build and treat everything after launch as somebody else’s problem.
Why the boring part loses
I think the reason is pretty simple: building has a finish line and ongoing maintenance doesn’t. You can ship a thing. You cannot ship upkeep. It just keeps going, nobody notices when it’s working, and everyone notices when it breaks.
Not to mention the recognition problem, because nobody gets promoted for “kept the thing running.” There’s no conference talk called “I Didn’t Break Anything for 18 Months,” even if I would pay to attend that. It’s a vicious cycle of companies focusing on launches → people optimize for launches → surprised Pikachu face when the thing they launched falls apart.
It’s the same reason overengineering is so seductive. Building the architecture is the interesting part. Migrating the data, writing the docs, training the team, answering the same question six times — that’s the part that actually determines whether anyone uses it. But it’s not fun. Nobody’s staying late because they’re excited to update a process doc.
It’s deeply humbling to maintain something, because it means living with past-you’s decisions. And past-you was apparently a maniac who didn’t document anything.
What actually helps
I’ve gotten better at this at work, mostly by tricking myself. Documentation is considered part and parcel with the feature. I schedule audits for myself and my team on our calendars instead of waiting for something to catch fire. Quarterly reviews include “what are we maintaining and is it still working” alongside “what are we building next?” I’ll warn you now: it doesn’t make the boring stuff fun, but it turns it into something expected, and expected is close enough to bearable.
My personal projects are… a different story. Nobody is holding me accountable for whether I use my own coffee calculator. And believe it or not, I haven’t scheduled quarterly reviews to ask myself why my side project adoption metrics are flat. It’s more like me wandering into a forgotten corner of a house, noticing that I built a thing, and then wandering off again.
The uncomfortable truth
The boring part is where the value lives. That build might get you from zero to one, but the maintenance is everything after that. And “everything after that” is where your users are, where your data lives, where the thing either works or quietly rots.
That’s the whole update. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a calculator I should probably go use (but most likely won’t).