Some time mid January 2023, about 8 months ago, I embarked on a new phase of life. The plan was to build 5 projects in 5 months with an exact notion of what I wanted to achieve. Even though I did meet some of my targets, I largely missed the mark. So here I am writing down my learnings from this experimental journey.
A quick timeline
I have finished my 3rd project and am currently formulating an official launch. It is called Prospect and is already available here. Prospect, Joblead and AiRetreat make it 3 projects completed in 8 months. That averages to about two and a half months per project. However, the actual project time for each was vastly different. The first project Joblead was completed within 3 weeks and launched at the end of January. AiRetreat took about 3 months and debuted early May. And now I have spent another 4 months to finish and launch Prospect. Overall, a major deviation from the planned timeline and something to improve upon in the future.
The key learnings
There seem to be something new I learnt every week, if not every day so it would be near impossible to mention every little thing in a single blog post. Instead, here are my 3 main takeaways from these past 8 months.
- Take a step back and recalibrate often. Writing code everyday kept me throughly buried in the minute details of the project I was working on. Sometimes, I would spend weeks working on a feature only to realize a mistake or an incorrect assumption that ruins multiple weeks of hard work. As this kept happening over and over, I started doing retrospectives with myself. These retrospectives were aimed at keeping my day to day work aligned with my long term goals. Is this, really amazing feature worth the extra 2 weeks it will add? Now that some of the original assumption no longer hold true, should I spend a few weeks on refactoring the system as per new findings? Questions like these became a staple of my retrospectives and helped navigate the overall project efficiently. So it has now become a habit for me to periodically ask myself am I still walking in the right direction? When the answer is not a resounding yes, I take a step back and recalibrate my path forward.
- Acknowledging and accepting self doubt is more helpful than fighting or denying it. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by smart and intelligent people. But with that also comes self doubt. Numerous conversations over the past months, have left me with immense questions. Am I doing the right thing? Is this project worth building? Is it better to simply quit and find a job? My default reaction to it was to fight it and simply channel my willpower to suppress it. This helped but my willpower would take a huge hit. Then if self doubt crept up again, I would not have enough willpower left to fight it. Soon I realized, there was a different approach to tackling this. I started accepting the self doubt and started being ready for a future where my ongoing endeavors might fail. Am I doing the right thing? Maybe not, but I will do it till next week and see if I feel differently. Is this project worth building? Probably not, but let me spend another month on it and release a simple MVP before I stop. Is it better to simply quit and find a job? Seems like it. Let me set a date in the next month to do so. These simple solutions would give me a clear plan of action to continue what I was doing, while ensuring my self doubt had been sated by an acceptable future outcome.
- Best way to fight low motivation is a complete downtime. June and July were my toughest months of this entire 8 month period. I had even written a post about my struggles during June. The solutions I mentioned for low motivation did not work well enough. A little break or weekend rest, would rejuvenate me but I would fall into the abyss of low enthusiasm pretty quickly. So i just chugged along, until my wife suggested a short and quick getaway. We went to a nearby town and stayed in a cabin in the woods for a few nights. For the first time in years, I travelled without my laptop or my Nintendo Switch. I did have my phone on me, but beyond chess I am not really hooked to any app on it. So for the first time in a long while, I was somewhat disconnected. We did some nice nature walks, saw a beautiful coffee farm and spent our evenings listening to cicadas. The cicadas were noisy and a little annoying but the overall stay was amazing. And the break fully refreshed me. I was back to my old, super excited self. On our return trip, I could not wait to get back to work.
These three things along with many others have significantly change me. And I am now excited to see where it all leads.
A look back
This year so far has been a breath of fresh air. I have gone from being a pure backend engineer to learning significant amounts of frontend engineering as well learning the basics of good visual design. Hopefully all these improvements in myself will reflect in Prospect as well as all my future projects. The learnings mentioned above only provide a narrow glimpse into everything I have learnt so far. But I truly believe we never stop learning. So on the path of further self improvement, I will keep trudging along.
As I rollout Prospect, I will continue to post my findings and my experiences. For now, you can try the test version or Prospect or watch the demo. If you would like to tag along, follow me here or on twitter and stay tuned for my next post.