When I was getting started in Web Development, I was told it was good to be the most precise and detail-oriented you can possibly be. I worked with people who had much more technical knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes and I felt very confused. Not only was I not able to understand how everything worked, I also didn't feel a strong need to learn a good 80% of it. I wanted to build stuff, I didn't care whether the Fibonacci sequence was useful for authorization systems or that writing your own code was often much more efficient than using a library. I just wanted to make the things that excited me and I wanted to do it quickly, so I became a product developer.

I define a "Product Developer" as a developer who has a product-first mindset. Someone who prefers to focus on writing real functionality, as efficiently as possible. This doesn't mean that code quality and code efficiency aren't important; on the contrary, they become much more important. There's nothing that will slow you down as much as writing buggy code. However, a product developer won't spend hours or days trying to optimize a piece of code when a user won't actively notice the difference. They believe that they can write 80% of a product's functionality in 20% of the time.

Since I made the decision to focus on what I enjoyed, I found a real market for what I do. There are many small businesses and entrepreneurs who want to build a product or test an idea and just want it done as efficiently as possible. I learned many languages and tools, so I could apply the right one for the job. I'm not the best developer I know, I'm not even the best Ruby or Elixir developer I know, but I'm proficient at a whole set of language and tools that make it possible for me to build anything, and do so efficiently.

I've come a long way since I started all those years ago but the part of me that's generally disinterested in deep technical details still exists. However, instead of that making me feel insecure and worried that I'll never become a 10x developer, it gives me great confidence and clarity on who I am as a person and a developer. I guess what I want to say with this article is that it's fine not to be interested in optimizing the last little details of your code. It's fine to want to build MVPs all day. It doesn't make you a worse developer, it just means you're going to be working with/for a different market, and that's cool!