Nearly everyone in the software industry has an idea or side project that they want to take “all the way”. I had dozens of ideas, and even hacked on a couple projects here and there. But, the constraints of a career always took precedence. Sometimes it was the employer owning any potential IP, completely forbidding moon lighting, or just not having anything left to give after a hard week of work.
Like many others, I quit my job at Facebook (wasn’t Meta when I was there) after 2 years of remote work in COVID, and decided to give it my complete focus. I decided that I could take one of the projects that I could “build in a weekend”, and just go for it. In fact, it took me about 5 months of full time work!
I opened a blank editor and just started writing code. I told myself, make a commit a day, and just keep building. I didn’t quite hit that goal, but I did grind it out. Having no co-founder was great for awhile, until I quickly ran into my own limited intelligence. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to debug my own problems.
I just sat in an empty office and banged it out until I solved the problem. I just refused to quit. After launching my MVP, it was in no way realistic that I could have written it in a weekend. Nor was it close to realistic that I could have just worked weekends and eventually launched. Could a more competent coder done it faster? Sure, but there’s a lot more to a project once you need to charge a customer, once your database queries and schemas have to be multi-user, and you need the service to be reliable enough for a customer to pay for.
I’ll be continuing to build features, on-board customers and build out this software service. It’s been completely worth doing, but this is still day 1, and there’s a lot left to do. This journey is only 1% complete!
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