Less has always made more sense to me. Not as a philosophy I adopted, but as a way of seeing that felt natural. A haiku over an essay. A function that does one thing. A photo with room to breathe. The world pushes you toward more. I keep pulling toward less.
The best side projects start small. One feature. One problem. One user (usually yourself). They succeed because they do one thing well, not because they do everything poorly.
Text files are small. No formatting. No metadata. Just characters. They outlive every fancy format because they don’t try to be more than they are. The .txt file from 1990 still opens. The proprietary format from 2010 is already obsolete.
Small games often hit harder than big ones. Papers Please is stamping documents. Limbo is walking right. Stray is being a cat. They don’t try to be everything. They pick one idea and execute it completely.
Code works the same way. The best functions do one thing. The best CSS rules target one concern. The best commits change one thing. When you try to do everything at once, you do nothing well.
I write haiku. I write blog posts. Each is one idea. I cut everything else. Some posts are three hundred words. That’s enough if the idea is clear.
I build side projects, and I think about constraints. What’s the smallest version that works? What can I cut? What’s really essential? The small version ships.
I look at websites, and I see bloat. Megabytes of JavaScript for a blog. Hundreds of dependencies for a simple form. We add things because we can, not because we should. The best sites I visit are small. Fast. Focused. They respect my time and my bandwidth.
Photography taught me this too. The best photos often have negative space. Empty areas. Room to breathe. You don’t need to fill every pixel with information. Silence matters.
Japanese aesthetics understood this centuries ago. ma is the space between things. The pause. The emptiness that gives meaning to what surrounds it.
Small things are easier to understand. Easier to maintain. Easier to share. Easier to finish. They compound in ways big things don’t. Write one haiku and you’ll write another; finish one small project and you’ll start the next one. The momentum comes from completion, not ambition.
I’m not saying never build something big. I’m saying build it from small pieces. One feature at a time. One commit at a time. One day at a time. The big thing emerges from accumulated small things, not from grand plans.
Small things ship. Small things teach you. Small things compound. Small things matter.
This is my ode to them.