Art & Creativity Quote by Bill Budge

There’s an almost impolite honesty in “I write my programs primarily for myself,” the kind that cuts against today’s performative rhetoric of “user-first” everything. Read plainly, it’s a statement about craft: the first audience is the maker, the first problem to solve is your own. But the subtext is sharper. Budge is implicitly rejecting the fantasy that software emerges from pure altruism or committee consensus. Good programs, he suggests, start as personal tools: idiosyncratic, opinionated, built to scratch a real itch rather than to satisfy an abstract market profile.

That self-centeredness isn’t selfishness so much as a quality-control mechanism. If you’re the user, you can’t hide behind vague requirements or ambiguous feedback. Every friction point is yours to feel. The line also hints at a pragmatic philosophy common in early computing and indie software culture: build something that works for you first, then let it earn its universality. Many of the most influential tools began as “selfish” solutions that happened to match other people’s needs.

Calling Budge a businessman adds another layer. This isn’t the romantic “artist in a garret” pose; it’s a market insight. Software that begins with genuine personal utility can become a product precisely because it is concrete, lived-in, and relentlessly iterated. The risk, of course, is solipsism: confusing your workflow for everyone’s. The quote’s quiet challenge is to balance those forces - use the self as a proving ground, not a prison.