As you can see, the view count quickly came back to normal. Still, it brought me, 100+ new followers, on Medium, a dozen on Twitter. So far, the article generated 355$, which is also a new record for me. It doesn’t pay the new water bill I just received (no kidding :p), but it’s certainly welcome ;-) Regarding the article’s subject, the truth is that I mostly worked in environments where I could afford to be very serious about code quality, security, and operational excellence. I worked for a large financial institution in Belgium for 12+ years and there, budgets are of course huge. Before I started my consulting firm and my current project, I had a team of 10+ engineers with me, was responsible for software architecture, security, and build tooling for all the development teams. As you can guess, the budgets and time that I had were incomparable to a small 3-person startup. Still, I embarked on my current startup project with my usual mindset/approach. Long story short, 20 months later, the product is still in the making. To seasoned tech entrepreneurs, it is clearly an anti-pattern, and it is obvious to me now. During all that time, I tried my best to make progress on the project, all while striving for great quality results. But it was just too much for our tiny team. We’re 3 on-board, only two with a technical background, and I’m the one taking care of most technical details (security, authentication, authorization, build tooling, CI, code quality management, testing, backlog management, project planning, etc). I aimed too high and failed to lower the bar soon enough. Of course, we’ve got great quality code, a rock-solid infrastructure as code (e.g., I can throw away the whole infrastructure and build it from scratch using 2-3 commands), etc. But feature-wise, we’re clearly way behind schedule. So, in conclusion, that’s probably a good read if you’re thinking about getting into entrepreneurship/product creation. On my end, I consider this a valuable lesson, but don’t regret anything; I learned a ton during that time, and it filled-in my bucket list of articles to write for years to come. As an added benefit, it reinforces some of the advice that I give in my new book ;-)
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