charly357

I had a remarkably similar journey. I started with a small shareware app around 2004, an FTP client for Windows that had moderate success. There was a guy named Steve Pavlina who ran a blog where he explained his shareware business extremely well. He was very inspiring to me and ultimately convinced me to abandon the corporate programming job and become an independent software developer.

After much effort, I was earning enough from the FTP client to make a living, so I wanted to develop another app to diversify my risk. That one was a failure. I persisted and developed a third app around 2012: an email automation tool for Windows, something I actually needed myself. This one was also a success.

Finally, around 2020, I decided to focus exclusively on the email automation tool and develop a browser-based version of it. I've found that if you want to build something worthwhile, it's better to focus—even at the cost of more risk. That decision turned out to be the right one.

Regular expressions are a very useful tool in a programmer’s toolbox. But they can’t do everything. And one of the things they can’t do is to reliably parse CSV (comma separated value) files. This is because a regular expression doesn’t store state. You need a state machine (or something equivalent) to parse a CSV file.