So I’m building a startup on a side and I convinced my friend Tarei to join me. It’s going to be a great journey I can tell and whether we’re going to win or lose the journey is what matters.
The thing is that this startup idea before it became “our” startup idea it was “my” startup idea. This means me working by myself on the solution that I thought would be great. The thing about working by yourself is that you have no one to talk to, no one to share the problems with but also no one to annoy. So when Tarei joined my idea to work on our idea, the first thing he almost got a heart attack within minutes. I truly believe that this post is a dedication to my code 🙂
You see when you’re by yourself you just want to get things done no matter what and you don’t really think about the future. Especially I do not, my brain works on 1000 thoughts per second and very often people don’t understand me because I talk quicker than I think. And it shows in my code. And I’m sure it shows in my blog posts too haha! How many times you read the first half of a post and you thought it’s going to be about “something” and it turns out to be about something else? My usual day with myself.
So back to my code. If you’re not familiar with programming, it’s like speaking another language and writing an essay about it. If you’re not descriptive enough an average reader will get a gist of what you’re trying to tell but might not understand what your full message is. Kind of like reading Shakespeare when you’re high. When Tarei looked at my code the first thing he noticed – no documentation, no standards and in general “do whatever you want” attitude.
And he’s right. The art about working by yourself is dealing with yourself only. You don’t really think about the future until the future arrives. And when it arrives it might not necessarily be your problem anymore. But that thinking got us into space where the first… well… many hours we spent on standardising the code and putting some rules that both of us can follow. And if in the future we have 100 people working on the project, then all of them will follow too.
By not looking in the future and planning properly, I cut a lot of hours during the development. The thing is that I caught up with it now by cleaning up the code and will probably even surpass it in the future. The lesson learned is to always plan ahead. Even with a startup where everything supposed to be agile and quick, cutting corners will catch up with you sooner or later. I’ve learned my lesson today and Tarei has been taught the lesson too haha! I’m surprised he’s sticking around, I looked at some of my old code and nearly fainted too. A great start of the journey but I’m pumped and after hard 8h of work today on a new project on a public holiday I’m more excited than ever. Can’t wait to tell you everyone what’s that secret thing that we’re building 🙂