Today is a great day to build
That's what I tell myself almost every morning. Not in some motivational-poster kind of way, but because it's true.
Most general advice is that you need a plan. A roadmap. A clear business case. I tried a lot to do that, but I realized that I've never worked that way.
My process is simple: I run into something annoying, I wonder if I can fix it, and then I disappear for a few days (or weeks) trying to figure it out. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Either way, I learn something.
Take Metro MCP. I didn't wake up thinking "I need to build an MCP server for transit data." I woke up thinking "Why can't I just ask my AI Agent when my train is coming? Why cant I dynamically automate it?" That question bothered me enough to figure out how to connect LLMs to real-time transit APIs.
Now it's live at metro-mcp.anuragd.me, and people are actually using it. Wild.
That's the pattern: personal pain point → obsessive building → something real. This is how I learn. This is how I push myself.
Here's what I've figured out: the world doesn't need another person with a five-year plan and a perfectly polished resume.
It needs more people who see something broken and think "I wonder if I could fix that" and then actually try.
It needs people who ship messy v1s instead of perfect never-released projects.
It needs tinkerers.
Because tinkering isn't just about building random projects. It's about developing a bias toward action. It's about learning to trust your ability to figure things out. It's about proving to yourself that you can go from "I have no idea how to do this" to "okay, it works" through sheer persistence.
That's the real skill. Not knowing everything. Not having a plan. But being willing to start anyway.