There's a lot we don't need

This time around, I just wanted to share one article from a creator I find particularly inspiring: Pieter Levels, from Nomadlist - among many other projects. If you're into building software, you absolutely have to read this article.

If you're on Twitter or following the community of indie hackers and makers out there, you're probably familiar with Pieter Levels. He's the guy who became famous for creating 12 startups in 12 months, but more so for being one of the most prolific, transparent and charismatic developers who build in the open.

Arguably, his most well-known project is Nomadlist, a platform allowing nomads and nomad-wannabes (like myself) pay for a Slack channel that I never use, find very useful information for travel destinations that I always forget to check before booking anything, and to log all my trips on a website, which I do once or twice per year. But it gives a sense of belonging to a tribe and most importantly, I find it's very honest work and a completely bootstrapped project with very clear principles, and that deserves all the recognition and support in the world.

While we differ greatly in politics and economics, mostly, I find his approach to lifestyle, transparency and minimalism very appealing. I also admire the capacity of shipping software he's got. I have a couple of times reported bugs to Nomadlist and he solved and deployed the corresponding fixes within five minutes.

One of his last blog posts has been super eye-opening and speaks at length about the culture of excessive abundance we've got in options/tooling/frameworks nowadays' web development landscape. It reminded me of the famous talk Website Obesity.

One of the most shocking facts included in this article is summarised in a tweet:

He literally started using git in November 2020. You read it right. More than ten years after developing every.single.day.

Just wanted to share this article with you, after a few lines of context, because I think it pretty much sums up a few things I believe to be true (and we do, too, at MarsBased):

• It's ok to be different
• Just because everyone else is doing X, you don't have to do it
• Less is more
• Don't focus on attention or exposure
• One step at a time
• Overengineering is never rewarding

Check it out here:

https://levels.io/deviance/ - hope you enjoy it!