Being brainless!

I have been traveling all across SE Asia since November 2019. This was part of my long term digital nomad lifestyle which would have otherwise taken me to live for about 6 months each in Japan, Canada, Denmark (or another Scandinavian nation) and New Zealand. That, mixed with bakpacking through South America, Africa and Eastern Europe was my dream for the next 3-5 years.

Then 2020 happened. By mid-March it was clear to me that things are going to get difficult, travel wise. I was in Luang Prabang, Laos at that moment and wanted to take a flight to Bangkok, Thailand. I booked the ticket and showed up at the airport only to be prohibited entry because Thailand had changed their Visa on Arrival policy the week before. I had a little bit of a panic and took a bus to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. The next morning I tried the Friendship bridge between Laos and Thailand but was given the same reason for not allowing entry to Thailand.

I think it was March 18, 2020 and it hit me that I will be stuck in Vientiane with a group of stranded travelers. Some of them were waiting for a flight out, while others were just waiting out the situation. I felt that not having my usual travel mode might negatively affect my mental state of being. I was honestly super happy and high up to that point. So I decided to get back to the founder communities online, the ones which have always given me a sense of belonging and purpose.

After lurking around a week or so, I decided to start a new product journey. My plan from 2019 was to continue working on my previous Travel startup, but I paused that due to the uncertainty hovering the pandemic. I worked on an initial, quite broken, prototype and started talking to potential customers. With about 3 months of effort, still staying at the same place in Vientiane, I had a really clear picture of the MVP.

As an engineer with lots of founder connections across the world, I am blessed with the skills, peer-support and finances to create a new product journey. I understand deeply how important and fundamental these are to the quality of life that I do. I am not a money-driven person, rather very mission driven. Being able to focus on a problem and start solving it is an immense luxury. I know this since I did not have it in my growing up years.

Now, in the month of August 2020, I am happy for where I am with my product. I have been some great connections with interested early adopters, mainly from the US. I will double down on my efforts to connect with European founders since I want to go back and live there for some months post-pandemic. Meanwhile I will focus on launching the MVP and marketing it.

It has been about 5 months since the first lock-down (Laos and India had it almost at the same time) and so many people are negatively affected. Small and Medium businesses are at the edge of a steep fall across the world. Our lives and economies have been affected in incomprehensible ways. Understanding that I have the luxury to hole up in a random place on the planet and work, I surely intend to use this time for the purpose of fueling other entrepreneurs' goals and accelerating our global comeback. More power to people.

When you do software development (or any other work for that matter), getting to the first 60% is comparatively easier than the rest 40%. The initial 60% work usual is bulk work, broad plans, overviews from 3000 feet high and all. But the more you cross that mark of broad planning and go into the details, work becomes art. The first lot is almost always science. The last part is true craftsmanship. This is something that any team must consider when they work on projects of any size where quality matters. Of course if you can pass your project with just coarse details then do not even bother to read this blog.

I have myself been programming with web languages (mainly PHP) for the last 7 years at least. Before that I had C, C++ in school and college. And even before that BASIC in lower classes in school. And it all started with LOGO when I was just 6 years old perhaps. Yes these many years and it still takes time to think through a large project. The initial outline comes within the first 30 seconds. But as I go deeper into the details, the architecture shifts. It is not always performance that you need to take care of. Code maintenance is also a big headache. You do not want to be stuck with code which is difficult to hand over to team members. That is basically dead code.

Also the modern stack of code for the web has changed dramatically. It has become a habit to think in terms of APIs. This enables loosely coupled architecture which is probably the best thing about the web itself. When designing web software though one thing I had to learn the hard way is that UI is most important. I have always thought of it, but still failed many times to stick to that rule. Slowly we have almost got to that point though and soon it will be better. But it is very essential to understand usability in user facing software. Code comes later.

A good software product is made of many components. Raw lines of code are just a part of it, very important ones though. But a very efficient data crunching tool will fail if it allows only XML files to be imported. People may have Excels, CSVs and what not. So it is most important to understand the audience. All these go in that ultimate great piece of code. In the end a product is also the packaging, the color, the logo, the manual that comes with it right? Same for software.

So from the next time you start a project by coding, think. Do the above points apply to it? If so try avoiding mistakes noted here. Go make some new mistakes :P