Shipping Solo in 2026
Focus systems, scope cuts, and the discipline of finishing what you start.
Solo development is a focus sport. Skill matters, but unfinished projects are usually attention failures, not talent failures.
I ship vertical slices. One journey works end-to-end before I polish secondary screens. A talking expense logger beats a perfect settings page with no core loop.
Timeboxing helps. Weekly demos — even to yourself on camera — create externalized accountability.
Scope cuts are love letters to the future. Every feature you delay is a feature you might finish.
Tooling should reduce ceremony. Expo, TypeScript, and typed data files let me move without waiting for a platform team I do not have.
Burnout hides in context switching. Batch similar work. Protect deep focus blocks like client meetings.
Finished and imperfect compounds. Endless almost does not.