On Becoming a Solo Developer

#personal #career

After a lot of reflection, I’ve decided to voluntarily leave Amazon and spend the next year (2025–2026) as a solo developer.

This is one of the most important decisions I’ve made on my own so far.

I’m deeply grateful for my time at Amazon—for the people I worked with, and for the opportunity to learn how to build, operate, and scale real systems in production. I’ll carry those lessons with me wherever I go.

Over time, though, I realized I wanted something different.

The Problem with Big Tech

I value my time and I want to live a life with purpose; that means I want to spend my limited time doing meaningful things. But I don’t think I was doing that in big tech.

A reality of big companies is that they often don’t hire because they need people to create value for customers; they simply hire because they can afford to. This stems from a principal-agent problem: middle managers hire to increase their scope. Once there are more people, a monolith service is split into multiple microservices, making it easy for teams to contribute (e.g., separated deployment schedules). Then comes the debut of new cross-team collaboration work…

Why Now and Why a Solo Developer

As a Defensive Career Strategy

In the age of AI, it is apparent that the bar for technical work has decreased dramatically, which I don’t think bodes well for supply and demand dynamics.

Since everything is changing so quickly, I believe a good defensive strategy is to understand the process end-to-end. I need not only technical skills but also product, marketing, and a broader range of abilities.

I think understanding how value is created and knowing how to create it is a skill set that will always be valuable.

So I want to put myself right into the market, directly facing the customers.

I also find that I care the most when I take full accountability.

Best Time to Learn and Work

The upside of AI is that it makes acquiring knowledge and completing work much more efficient. Work that once required 5 people can now be done by 1.

Choosing Freedom

In the stock market, risk is often correlated with potential profit.

The same is true in the career landscape (to some extent). Choosing stability means sacrificing some freedom. Choosing freedom means taking on more risk.

I guess I value freedom more.

What I’ll Be Working On

Over the next year, I’ll be focused on building thoughtful, human-centered consumer apps.

Less optimization-obsessed. Less metric-driven for the sake of metrics. More soul. More care. More intentional design.

I have a few early ideas in mind, but I’m intentionally leaving space to explore, learn, and adjust. The path is uncertain—but I’m confident it will be meaningful and memorable.

Gratitude

I also want to thank my family—especially my girlfriend and my mom.

Their support gave me the courage to take this step. Without their belief in me, this decision would have been much harder, if not impossible.

I don’t know exactly where this year will lead—but I’m excited to find out.

Updates

  • 2025-12-26: Major revision of content with an emphasis on what truly matters to me. Also updated title and summary.