Fourteen years, one keyboard

I started writing code in 2013. I’m writing this fourteen years later. Same person, roughly the same hands, a wildly different brain.

I won’t pretend it was a tidy story. It wasn’t. But if I could send a few notes back to the guy who’d just written his first ugly, working program, this is what I’d send.

Nobody is coming to give you permission

For years I waited to feel ready. Ready to lead, ready to call the architecture, ready to say “no, we’re not building it that way.” That readiness never arrives as a feeling. It arrives because you did the thing while feeling unready — and then it was done.

The best projects of my career happened because I stopped waiting for a signal that was never going to come.

The framework is never the hard part

2013 me thought being good meant knowing the most tools. Fourteen years and one company scaled across a continent later: the framework is the easy part. The hard part is the messy human reality the framework has to survive — the unclear requirements, the founder with a big dream and zero technical background, the user on a dying phone.

Learn the tools. Then forget about them and go look at the actual problem.

Tools are tools. The job is the problem, never the stack.

Ship it

In 2014 a few of us entered a regional startup competition with a version one that was held together mostly with hope. It won its category. Not because it was polished — because it existed, and it worked just enough to show what we meant.

I’ve since watched beautiful projects die quietly in a branch because they were never quite ready. And I’ve watched rough, slightly embarrassing ones turn into real companies because they simply went live.

Momentum is a feature. Get it in front of someone real, then make it good. A thing that exists beats a perfect thing that doesn’t.

Close the laptop

This is the one I’m worst at, so I’ll say it loudest. The code will still be there tomorrow. The bug will still be there tomorrow. The deploy can wait until tomorrow far more often than I pretend it can.

[fill in: this is where the life-beyond-code part goes — what do you actually do when you close the laptop? Make it specific and a little personal. The site should sound like a human, not a corporate bio.]

Still here

Fourteen years on — one keyboard later, give or take a few keyboards — I still like this. The puzzle still pulls. That’s the part 2013 me got right by accident: not the tooling, not the plan, just picking something that, on a good day, doesn’t really feel like work.

Here’s to the next fourteen.