You should write a game

Download Cursor/Aider/whatever, vibe code a game in Godot, Bevy, Unity, Unreal, etc. Seriously. It's fun. It's creative. It's better than engaging in proactive stakeholder alignment, leveraging strategic communication methodologies to drive consensus and mitigate potential friction points.

Humanity

A solo project will remind you that you are a human. You are creative. Whatever your company thinks you're worth, it's ten times that. It will remind you that you can create truly amazing things when you're not implementing a robust governance structure and fostering a culture of transparency to empower teams to proactively identify and course-correct risks before they escalate into critical path blockers.

What's that? An excuse? You don't have time? Well delivering a project on time is not merely a function of deadline adherence but a holistic exercise in resource optimization, expectation management, and adaptive execution.

Make a game. Do it yourself, maybe jam with a friend. But do it because it's fun, it's liberating, and you can feel like there's something human still left in you after a day spent ensuring project trajectory remains on schedule and aligned with broader business objectives, thereby maximizing value creation and reinforcing stakeholder trust.

Learning

You can learn a lot too. Have you ever written something in an ECS framework? Did you know Prime Video implemented an entire UI renderer in WebAssembly using an ECS framework for delivering a fast, consistent experience across devices with over-the-air updates? That's right: knowing how to do more than one thing can drive sustained value realization by remaining impact-oriented.

If you're like me, you probably work with HTTP APIs all day (or maybe gRPC or whatever.) But game networking is much different. Try adding netcode to your game. Make it multiplayer. Learn how to simulate the game on the server using UDP to transmit commands. Figure out how to scale it (hint: Kubernetes won't save you.) The challenges are new, fresh, and fun.

Why should you care about learning new things? Claude Shannon invented digital circuits because he knew analog circuits and boolean algebra (a rare combination at the time.) Computers exist because of him. Today's AI exists because David Rumelhart knew differential calculus. For context, backpropogation was unsolved for 17 years. Maybe the only thing stopping you from discovering a seismic shift in the fabric of technology is that you're too busy making real-time reporting dashboards.

Productivity

We're in a golden era where the cost of creativity has plummeted. What might have taken a team of 10 people can be done by one person. Sure, AI is destroying the environment, poising our brains, and killing jobs, but it's also created the opportunity for smaller teams to compete with larger incumbents. And, if it's not abundantly clear, small teams spend less time instituting a governance architecture that balances strategic oversight with operational agility to preemptively address misalignment risks before they escalate into critical disruptions.

Here's an early video from my first game, which implements simple kinematics to move the ball and the board. The amazing thing is, AI implemented almost everything up to this point.

Okay, maybe games aren't your thing. Maybe what you really want is to make an iOS camera app that applies nostalgic film filters. Maybe you want to create a calendar app that isn't just a wrapper around Google, Apple, or Microsoft. Maybe you want to destroy your least favorite SaaS provider by undercutting them with a fraction of the capital. Those are fine too. Find your creative outlet and show the world what you can do.

Or maybe coding is what you do for work and you want to spend your free time with your family, going on long walks in nature, painting a landscape, and eating fancy ice cream. Honestly, I can't fault that.