Building in the Margins

There's a version of the indie developer story that goes like this: someone quits their job, moves to a cheap city, lives frugally, and bets everything on a product. It makes for a good narrative. It's also not the only way.

I have a full-time job as Lead Software Engineer at Elemental Machines. I'm finishing a master's degree. I run Honeyside, my software studio, which has clients. I've shipped Barba Studio, a live booking app for barbershops. I built a full accounting system for my own use. I write here.

None of that is happening instead of the other. All of it is happening at the same time.

The margins

The margins are real. They're the hour before work starts, the 45 minutes after dinner, the Saturday morning before the rest of the family wakes up. They're not glamorous and they don't scale infinitely — there's a ceiling on how much you can compress into the edges of a day before it starts to cost you sleep, attention, or presence.

But inside those margins, compounded over months and years, it's surprising how much gets built.

Barba Studio was built entirely in margins. So was the accounting software I use to run Honeyside. So was every product I've shipped independently over the past twelve years. Not in a heroic, grind-at-all-costs way — in a quiet, consistent, one-session-at-a-time way.

What makes it work

The single most important variable is not wasting the time you have.

When you have four hours on a Saturday morning, the worst thing you can do is spend the first ninety minutes deciding what to work on, setting up, getting into the right mindset. The session is gone before it started.

What works for me: I always know, before I close the laptop at the end of a session, what the next thing is. Not a vague direction — a specific, concrete next task. When I sit down again, I start immediately. No warm-up. No deciding.

The second variable is protecting the time you have. Margins are easy to give away. A social obligation here, a distraction there, and the Saturday morning that was supposed to be four hours of focused work becomes one. I've learned to be more deliberate about this — not antisocial, just clear about what I'm trading when I say yes to something.

Stack depth as a multiplier

This is why I've stayed on the same stack for twelve years. Every hour I spend learning a new framework is an hour I'm not building. In a full-time job I could afford to explore freely — there's always tomorrow, always another sprint. In the margins, exploration is expensive.

The depth I've built in Node.js, React, and React Native means I rarely get stuck on the technology. When I sit down to build something, I'm solving product problems, not language problems. That's a real multiplier when time is the scarce resource.

The master's degree

The master's is its own margin — lectures, study sessions, exams layered on top of everything else. I won't pretend it doesn't cost something. It does.

What it's given me is a reason to think more rigorously about things I'd learned empirically over years. Distributed systems, algorithms, formal models — the kind of foundations that you can function without but that quietly improve the quality of your thinking when you have them.

I don't recommend doing it while running a business and holding a full-time job unless you have a specific reason to. I have mine.

What I'm not doing

To build in the margins, you give something up. For me it's mostly been: side projects that don't go anywhere, entertainment in the passive sense, and the comfortable feeling of having nothing on your plate.

I'm not optimizing for busyness. I don't think busyness is a virtue. What I'm optimizing for is a portfolio of things I care about — a full-time job I find genuinely interesting, products that solve real problems for real people, a degree that makes me better at what I do. If that means the margins are full, that's a trade I've made consciously.

The honest part

Some weeks it works beautifully. Everything moves forward, the sessions are focused, and you close the laptop feeling like you made real progress.

Some weeks it doesn't. The job is intense, the coursework piles up, a client needs something urgent, and the product doesn't get touched for ten days. That's also part of it.

The difference between people who ship and people who don't, in my experience, isn't that the former have more time. It's that they keep going when the momentum breaks. You pick it back up. You find the next margin. You start where you left off.

That's the whole method, really. There's no secret to it.