Daniel Crenna

Code Soloist #3: Stop guessing

You don’t know when you’re going to be done your next project.

If I had to pick a single drawback of being a code soloist, it’s this one. You may believe initially that you have a good feel for how long these things take, but you’ll only realize much later, when your artificial deadlines slip, that you really only have feelings, not a feel.

Your feeling is that any arbitrary, non-trivial amount of time is “enough”. For example, three months. That sounds like enough time to do just about anything if you’re armed with a decent development environment and have a good handle on what you’re trying to build. But “enough” is far from an educated guess.

You’ll be better off if you free yourself from the idea that what you’re up to needs a deadline at all. If three months was all it took to build what I’m working on these days, there would be four more competitors today. Instead, the landscape hasn’t changed, because software development is hard.

No matter what the scope of your solo project, however long it takes you, is how long it will take someone else. You can’t change reality by bending it to fit how short a window you think you should be able to work. Just work, keep working, and ship as soon as you (really) can.

Code Soloist is for single-person software development companies that are trying to start something big with their bare hands. In it, I try to impart whatever I’ve learned, for better or worse, doing the same thing badly.