Urgency

I was recently reading Don’t lose your unreasonable sense of urgency and it made me realize I lost mine.

In my search for perfection I have been optimizing instead of shipping. And it reminded me of my sense of urgency when I managed to ship in about 3 month about 500 apps on the app store. What stopped that project was

1. Apple: they changed their store guidelines and decided to shut down my business
2. Poor coding: not enough specs. With Apple shutting down my business I had no desire to refactor and remodel the business at the same time.

Since then I have focused my career on improving my skills, working with other people in various compagnies. I love to learn so that made sense at that time. I want to regain that sense of urgency as it made me ultra productive.

What excites me are:

• to build apps in the Information Technology space.
• to see them grow and harvesting the fruits
• to do it in a smart and efficient way

And what I need to motivate myself is

1. A technical path
2. A first sale
3. Next steps

A technical path

I call that a tracer bullet¹. I want a clear path from the initial idea to customers. I want that path to consider costs and growth. I want the maintenance costs (time and money) to be as small as possible.

an example:

Goal: Create an iOS app. Make it possible to port it to the web and to OSX

• Leverage React native to develop the app
• Use Clojurescript instead of Javascript
  • allows more code reuse (cljc runs on both javascript and java)
  • better code patterns (functional programming, immutability) -> less bugs
• Use re-frame. Still lightyears ahead of JS frontends and ultra stable.
• Use datascript on the client side to store state. One state queryable with a declarative language helps managing complexity².
• Use clean architecture to allow code reuse. I want to be able to extract the business logic to reuse it.
• Use TDD. Mimimum of 90% coverage. I don’t want to stuck afraid to refactor. I want to ship with confidence on every main branch commit.
• For the datatore, use sqlite3 embedded in the iOs app. Query it for all data needs. No server to maintain. No infra cost.

A first sale

• Publish on the app store
• Minimal price $0.99
• Make sure you provide enough value for that initial price.

Next steps

• For advanced functionalities, consider providing an API. That API needs to be available through a subscription to cover costs. Use Traefik and docker-swarm on a dedicated server on OVH cloud
• Expand business using strategies from The personal MBA³
• Web version
• OSX version
• Windows version