What I Believe In
When it comes to building more projects and progressing in my journey, there are a few things that I currently keep in mind. These “principles” have loosely bounced around my head for some time.
I’m certain I will continue to iterate them, and my understanding of them. These serve as guidance for the current period of my journey, not necessarily a declaration of my adherence to them.
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP) What’s the simplest working version of the product? Strive for that.
However, I find I approach this differently than many novice software engineers. They tend to completely neglect the security and understanding of their own code in favour of having what they consider a working product. Not only do I approach this differently, the mindset going in is different. I don’t consider that a working product. If anything it’s a vulnerability. ChatGPT and LLMs have also made this problem far more prominent. That being said, I’m also building different projects than some of those engineers. For example, since one of my current projects is an Ecommerce website with login functionality. This requires more initial attention to security for an MVP.
Then, even with the security and code understanding, I tend to include slightly more in the MVP than others might. If there is a feature unique to my product, and something I consider essential to branding and perception, then I will include it in the MVP with zero compromises since it might have ripple effects for the future of the product or business.
- Speed
Simple. Speed wins, and there are things that can be done in a much shorter period of time than you’re used to. Think ‘The 4 Minute Mile’.
- Share
Document your journey and progress as much as possible whilst ensuring the focus is on the final products and their usefulness. There is no point in documenting something that isn’t getting finished. This is not to undermine the importance of documentation, but to emphasize the priorities for this phase in your journey. Too many devs and creators of all sorts get caught up in bloat while the most important part of their project remains stagnant.
P.S.
For some reason, the list on this page is rendering all of the individual points as it’s own list, hence the three 1’s rather than 2, 3, and so forth. My markdown formatting should be correct as I’ve tested the pure markdown file in a markdown viewer and everything works perfectly fine there. It might be either an issue with this theme’s CSS or an issue with Kramdown but I’m not familiar with Kramdown myself and not sure if such an issue can arise as a result of it. I’ve spent a decent time debugging it. It’s time to move on to the main project at hand. But I will revisit this, especially for future posts.
In the meantime though, I unintentionally have a Tim Grover style list (everything is equally important to follow). Though this is not what I want for this particular list.