April 2, 2013 — For me, the primary motivation for creating software is to save myself and other people time.
I want to spend less time doing monotonous tasks. Less time doing bureaucratic things. Less time dealing with unnecessary complexity. Less time doing chores.
I want to spend more time engaged with life.
Saving people time is perhaps the only universal good. Everyone wants to have more options with their time. Everyone benefits when a person has more time. They can enjoy that extra time and/or invest some of it to make the world better for everyone else.
Nature loves to promote inequality, but a fascinating feature of time is that it is so equally distributed. Nature took the same amount of time to evolve all of us alive today. All of our evolutionary paths are equally long. We also have equal amounts of time to enjoy life, despite the fact that other things may be very unequally distributed.
The very first program I made was meant to save me and my family time. Back in 1996, to start our computer, connect to the Internet and launch Netscape took about 20 minutes, and you had to do each step sequentially. My first BAT script automated that to allow you to turn the computer on and go play outside for 20 minutes while it connected to the web. Many years later, my ultimate motivation to save people time has remained constant.