The creator judges the product compared to their imagining of what they wanted to make. Yhe piece invariably falls short (because our imagination is better than our skillset.)
Everyone else simply looked at the piece objectively. It was either beautiful or not.
I started to look at programs the same way. The criteria for judging my program differs to the criteria for judging other programs.
So for my software I care about architecture, clean code, the language I used, how clever it is.
I judge others by their UI, documentation, support, correctness, intuitiveness etc. I hate when their UI constantly changes. Even small (cosmetic) bugs turn me off.
But my stuff has no docs, the UI is butt ugly, there are some rough edges, but if you avoid the bugs it gives you the right answer (very fast) while consuming less ram, disk, or cpu. And I used new-framework or popular-new-language and runs on any OS etc.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I’ll grant that a cheap Windows laptop was the right call up until recently if price—not ease of use and maintenance—was the overwhelmingly dominant factor and a laptop was absolutely necessary. But the answer for a cheap device for a non-technical person with aspecific needs (email, browsing, media consumption) has been an iPad for a long time at this point.
Now... I'm glad I got a Mac.