The Power of Just Doing Things

Welcome to the first blog post of 2025! I wanted to write about a fundamental principle that has changed the way I approach things - both in my personal life and in my work as a developer. It's a simple concept, but one that has had a profound impact on how I tackle projects and challenges. That principle is simply this:

You can just do things.

I recently worked on and released a new project, Outlier Tools. What started as a basic idea - a pay analyzer for Outlier workers - turned into something much bigger than I expected. For some background, I started working at Outlier about a month ago. It's a subsidiary of Scale AI, and if you don't know who they are, they're kinda a big reason why the AI boom happened. Big labs get their data to train their models from companies like Scale, who use a contract workforce to produce training data.

One thing about Outlier is that from an engineering perspective, it sometimes really falls short. You work on a contract basis with an hourly pay rate, but the total hours you work are not shown to you on your dashboard, just your earnings. This was a problem for me, so I decided to build a tool to help me understand my pay better. On Outlier, you can download your pay statements as a CSV, so I just wrote a React app to parse and crunch all the data given in the CSV to show you things like:

1. Hours worked
2. Earnings broken down by project
3. Average hourly pay rate
4. How your pay is distributed

Honestly, it's really basic stuff, nothing that would be considered impressive by any means from a development perspective. But I thought other people would find it useful, so I gave it a public open source release. The response? Motion with Scale and their engineering lead reaching out to me about a potential engineering position at the company, hundreds of upvotes on Reddit, supporters on Ko-Fi, and a few thousand unique users in the span of a few days.

This goes to show that yes, you can just do things. People who put the effort forth to build something simple and useful can get a lot of mileage out of it. I'm not saying you should just build anything, but if you have an idea, just do it.

Outlier Tools has grown to more users than Avora ever has, which is a project I've been working on for years (albeit without advertising/publicity). If you build something that fills a need, people will use it - it doesn't matter how simple or trivial the problem its solving may be.

And here's the thing - there's really no excuse not to just do things anymore. With the tools and resources available today, the barrier to entry for creating something meaningful is lower than ever. Whether it's building a simple web app, writing a blog post, or starting a project, the only real obstacle is often our own hesitation. If you have an idea, there's nothing stopping you from bringing it to life except yourself.

The Beauty of Simple Solutions

Outlier Tools taught me that not everything needs to be a masterpiece of engineering. Sometimes, the best approach is to just build the thing, put it out there, and see what happens.

We often get caught up in planning, architecting, and trying to predict every possible scenario. But sometimes, you can just:

• Identify a problem
• Think of the simplest solution
• Build it
• Ship it

No master plan is ever required. You never need to go for perfect architecture.

Just do the thing.