What the hell is this?

If you're reading this, you were probably subscribed to my blog emails and wondering why you're suddenly getting something called "Build Something Stupid."

Here's the deal, I have this blog lucas-schiavini.com where I like to post things that I've fully digested and thought out. Things that worked. But it feels too clean sometimes. So I decided to create Build Something Stupid, a very messy newsletter that will show week to week what the reality of building new things is. It's messy, and often things don't work.

I spend most of my time half-building things, abandoning projects, having stupid ideas at 2 am, procrastinating on the important stuff, and occasionally shipping something that doesn't completely suck(regrets.io).

My blog is where I write about frameworks and philosophy. Why you should expose yourself to convex risks, why overthinking kills potential, and why you need to finish what you start.

This newsletter is where I show you me trying (and often failing) to live by those principles.

Every week, you'll get:

Some weeks, I might ship a whole feature. Other weeks, I might spend Tuesday doom-scrolling and Thursday questioning my entire life direction. You're getting both.

Because most good things start stupid. The first iPhone looked like a toy. Twitter was "status updates for narcissists." Every successful project began as someone's weird little experiment.

The problem isn't having stupid ideas. The problem is talking yourself out of them before you've built anything.

So I'm committing to building stupid things, documenting the process, and seeing what happens. No polish, no pretense, just the messy reality of making stuff.

I bought the domain buildsomethingstupid.com for $7 while writing this email. Impulse purchase? Maybe. But now I own it, so I guess I have to make it worth something.

Currently working on a spending tracker tool that probably already exists somewhere better, but I'm building it anyway because I want to understand how money tracking works. Right now, it sits on money.kyspi.com(still haven't thought of a cool name), still has no backend yet, and no way to download your data. But that's what I'm currently working on achieving.

The way I see it is I want a spending tracker app that:

I wrote this post a while back on Chronic Hobbyism, and how people who have a lot of ambition might jump from hobby to hobby with no end in sight. This post was my way at the time to answer those questions for myself.

Since then, I learned to play the guitar and actually understood what playing the guitar meant as daily practice. Understanding the effort of things is a great way to understand that you can't actually be 10/10 in everything.

So naturally, the next best thing I did was sign up for a filmmaking course, which will happen every Saturday from this week til December 6th. By then, I'll either hate filmmaking completely or fall in love and integrate into my work.

Good thing, tho, is that instead of my previous strategy of romanticizing things in my head, I'm running controlled experiments, I took 3 months of guitar classes, and now I know I could never do it professionally, I just don't vibe with it like that. I like playing by myself at home, and that's it.

With filmmaking, I'm expecting something similar by the end of December. Plus, being there already gives me ideas on indiehacking projects I could build.

I'm not sure if you can call this procrastinating, but ever since I've come in contact with Ruby on Rails philosophy, I've started looking for a way to have that in my day-to-day life. But you know, without having to learn a whole new stack. So I spent a good 2 weeks learning AdonisJS, the closest thing I could find in JavaScript to build things with more pleasure and have a stack that I love using. Anyways, we will see how this plays out in the upcoming months.

Being Treated as a Wannabe Rapper, great blog post on how “wannapreneurs"(yours truly) are very alike wannabe rappers, in a way, this newsletter is heavily inspired by this post, showing the angst of being in the cave.

This is Megatron(yes, really), and he loves watermelons. Thanks to my friend Andrew for the cat pic. If you want to see your cat in next week's issue, just reply to this email with the picture, the cat's name, and something cool about them.

Welcome to the experiment. Let's see how long it takes me to abandon this format and try something else.

Lucas

P.S. - If you hate this direction and want to go back to just blog notifications, hit reply and tell me. If you love it, also hit reply and tell me. I'm genuinely curious what you think of this shift.