Week 3

Day 15: The 19 day working week

Tuesday, 25th November 2014 00:01

I used to be fairly Garfield-esque in my views on Mondays. I hated Mondays, and they hated me. Mondays were out to get me; you could feel it in the air. I suspect much of this was associated with the fact that Monday marked the start of the working week and required me dragging my sorry backside into the office to face whatever the week was going to throw at me. Some jobs were more bearable than others, but they were that: jobs.

I often look forward to Mondays now. In fact I sometimes dislike Friday as is means the working week is basically over and I will have to wait until next week to get anything else done, unless I can squeeze some work into the weekend. Being invested in what you do has a tendency to do that to you.

Today is Monday, and it’s been a good day. I’ve made some excellent inroads into some development work, and I believe the rest of the team have also made headway on the stuff their working on. Tomorrow starts a run of 17 Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays on the trot as weekends blur into weekdays and I basically do a 3 week stint. That’s not to say I won’t be taking some time off over the weekends (I may try cramming a mythical 4 hour work week into each of the weekend days), but it does mean that I won’t be constrained by artificial definitions of when I should and shouldn’t be working. Long-term that’s a really unsustainable way of working, but short term I’m hoping to bash out some really good changes to Rainbird and capitalise on the time I have available.

That said, given the extreme highs and lows of being in a startup that’s in an accelerator I fully expect to declare the 19 day working week a monumentally stupid idea that would only be attempted by an utter moron by about Wednesday afternoon. We’ll see.

Day 16: Half day!

Tueday, 25th November 2014 23:50

After all the rhetoric of a 19 day working week yesterday I went and did a half day today - or at least that’s how it felt. In at 7ish, out at just after 5:30. Yup, I didn’t even manage an 11 hour day¹. Not only that, but on the surface of things I made negative progress insofar as the code I’m writing now does less than it did yesterday. Look a little deeper, however, and you’ll notice I’ve completely rewritten most of it to be nice and maintainable rather than the 100 or so lines of crap that I’d barfed into existence on Monday in order to prove a concept. This is most definitely considered A Good Thing™ and To Be Encouraged®.

I left as Ben and James were refactoring the business model and, on the surface of things, making as much progress as I appeared to have done. I’m pretty sure they’ve got as far as “Rainbird is…” (and, to be honest, if you want to guarantee that nothing is going to change you might want to narrow that down even further to ”…is…“). Still, I’m almost certain that, like the code refactoring, under the covers it’s all being rearranged to be neat, tidy and elegant. It’s also likely that if I actually stuck around until the end of the working day I’d know what goes on the right hand side of the sentence. I’ve no doubt I’ll find out tomorrow morning, in the mean time lets put in the placeholder ”…seriously cool stuff”.

The reason for my foreshortened day was a meal and drinks with some old colleagues of mine. I know we’re supposed to put our social lives on hold in case it interferes with the work/work balance, but it would seem churlish to spend this much time in London and not catch up with some friends. I could pretend it was business related and that I might be able to interest them in Rainbird, but if we’re honest most of them were, like me, first up against the wall when the revolution came² and not really in any of the target markets that we may or may not be interested in chasing. It was an evening off, pure and simple. And a good fun one at that.

Day 17: Techstars is like bodyboarding

Wednesday, 26th November 2014 22:31

Bathsheba, Barbados. An excellent bodyboarding spot

No, I haven’t completely lost the plot - bear with me on this one.

For those who don’t know, bodyboarding³ is a bit like surfing, except you lie down on a small, rigid foam board that’s about a meter in length. It’s also huge fun. Bodyboarding is often done much closer to shore than surfing, sometimes only riding small waves for a few meters until they break.

If you’re good/lucky you get to ride all the way back into shore before grabbing your board and running back out to get the next wave. If you’re unlucky you get pile-driven into the sea by the breaking wave and then tossed about violently. For larger waves the best advice is to just relax when this happens as it lessens the chance of breaking something.

So, Techstars. You get there, you charge out to sea, grab the first wave in and it’s awesome. You do it again, and again, and again, and it’s huge fun. It’s tiring, but you want to get back out there and ride another wave in. And then a big wave comes out of nowhere, slams you into seabed and threatens to drown you⁴. So you pick yourself up and you go find another wave because hopefully that’ll be fun and you want something to take your mind of the rather crap experience you just had.

Today was big wave, huge high, massive wipeout as the wave broke and crappy surf for the rest of the day. Hopefully tomorrows surf is better.

Day 18: Blood, sweat and tears

Friday, 28th November 2014 00:45

So Rainbird is a bit odd in terms of its founders. The company was founded by two people, Ben and James. I was employee number one, although I am considered to be, and treated like a founder. Whether you consider that to be legitimate or not is irrelevant - Rainbird is as much my company as it is theirs⁵, or indeed any one of the team.

We have built this company with our bare hands. Quite literally in some cases, since much of the furniture in our Norwich office had to be assembled by us. I hadn’t even finished month one of my journey with Rainbird before both blood and sweat had been put into the job⁶. I was fairly sure the tears would come at some point to complete the trifecta, I just wasn’t prepared for how.

Thursday afternoons at Techstars in London is the All Hands meeting where all the companies get together for various activities; be it pitching what you do, pitching what the other companies do or finding out what went well and what didn’t last week. This is followed by guest speakers and topped off by sponsored drinks and networking. The drinks start around 8ish, going on until late.

While food is laid on its finger food and there isn’t a huge amount of it. Couple that with a tough week, long hours and a need to blow off some steam and you end up with some members of Rainbird being fairly well lubricated.

Over dinner we then managed to polish off two bottles of wine⁷ and conversation turned to the wide ranging and philosophical subjects that tend to get raised when a few jars have been imbibed.

Chris, who was pretty well gone by this point, gave an impassioned speech on his outlook on life and how he saw Rainbird as a force for good. What he was trying to say was that we could reach out and make a positive impact on peoples lives. What he actually said was “I think we should touch people”. Now, I’m sorry, but I was tired, stone cold sober and not quite feeling the gravitas of the situation that comes with being in a slightly addled state, so my mind instantly decided to make light of the situation and completely misinterpret the phrase.

Couple that with the earnest way in which the line was delivered and I was just in fits of laughter. The juxtaposition of Chris in his mildly inebriated state delivering a heartfelt desire to do good in the world compared to my sober and yet utterly puerile interpretation of what was said sent tears rolling down my cheeks. I can now say, hand on heart, that I have put blood, sweat and tears into Rainbird - oh, and that I’m a complete child.

Day 19: Spent…

Friday, 28th November 2014 17:30

Early post today as I really don’t know if I’ll have time to write anything when I get back to the flat. My plan is to just get there and die, although I can’t do that for another couple of hours. That said, the brisk walk in the cold may wake me up. Not sure.

It’s been a long week, and I think the whole cohort is feeling it. Last night’s all hands lacked some of the bravado the first two weeks saw and people openly admitted that it’s getting tough.

I’ve got absolutely sod all done on the tech side today. I’ve basically stared at the screen and failed to construct any meaningful code. The day hasn’t been a total write-off though. I’ve had a few meetings which could be viewed as wildly unsuccessful or hugely beneficial, depending how you view them.

If I’m honest, the meetings that go really well, while great for the ego, aren’t always massively useful in working out if we’re going in the right direction. Perhaps if people were throwing fistfuls of cash at us they would be, but while we’re in the “hey, it’s free, come check it out” phase it’s reasonably easy to get a positive reaction. Where you learn is from the constructive feedback. The “This sucks for the following reasons” which help bring the points that need to be addressed into stark focus. Thankfully those points aren’t insurmountable, we just need to work hard and be smart about how we tackle them.

Tonight, however, I think the smart thing to do is switch off, get some sleep and come back to the problems refreshed and raring to go.

Day 21: Manflu

Sunday, 30th November 2014 22:37

This weekend has not been a good one. The set of things I wanted to achieve bears little resemblance to the set of things I actually achieved due, in no small part, to me quite literally crashing on Friday night.

I got home feeling dreadful, skipped dinner, went to bed early and got 10 hours sleep and another 2+ hours of lying in a bit of a daze on Saturday morning. I then had another 4 hour sleep in the afternoon, before settling in for another long sleep, waking up late this morning. I’ve felt dreadful for most of that time and done very little.

You may recall I said on day 9 that ”…my body is starting to tell me that if I don’t slow down that it’s going to put me down.” Well it did. Hard. Hopefully another decent night’s sleep will see me feeling better, but I suspect I may need to take it a bit easier this week.