Week 7
Day 43: We’re back!
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Monday, 5th January 2015 22:27 |
So, we’re back, although not without a false start. Turns out they’ve changed the opening hours for the office on Mondays so when Ben and I rocked up at just gone 7am we couldn’t get in. This wasn’t an insurmountable problem, we just went Shoreditch and sat in a Pret. I’m aware that you’re probably supposed to sit in a cafe that produces artisanal coffee, but we didn’t want to go full Shoreditch. You never go full Shoreditch.
The Techstars Clock Of Doom
The ever present clock was also waiting for us, albeit showing the wrong time. It had been left ticking down over Christmas so was showing 30 something days left which wasn’t want you wanted to be greeted with. It’s since been reset to show the proper time remaining. This now really is the time remaining. A little over 45 days until Demo day.
Working backwards this basically leaves us 3 weeks of the ‘build’ phase, then we start really getting sucked into putting together the demo day pitch. That in turn leaves us with far too much work to do in far too little time. Nothing new there then.
Given that, I’m now trying a slightly different routine for work. Up at 06:00, office for 7ish, work until 19:30, home, gym for an hour, eat, then an hour or two doing things like reading up on stuff, writing this blog and all the other non-development things that I need to do. Then bed, ideally for before midnight, but that generally never happens, followed by doing it all again the next day. Thursdays I’ll skip the gym due to the all hands and the drinks. Fridays are a shorter day as we tend to travel home. So that’s the plan. How it survives contact with reality is yet to be seen.
Day 44: The best laid plans…
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Tuesday, 6th January 2015 23:19 |
As we all know “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/gang aft agley”, which is Scottish for “If you tell the world what you plan to do it’s going to go wrong”.
This morning started with that lovely, unexpected feeling that I’d had quite a lot of sleep, followed by a realisation that the alarm going off wasn’t mine and wasn’t in my room, quickly followed by the deduction that I’d overslept. An expletive escaped my lips, I checked the time (7am, an hour late), and managed to set a personal best for getting up and leaving the flat (15 minutes).
As is always the way a bunch of unexpected problems with the code I was working on then conspired to keep me in the office a bit later than hoped meaning I got back too late to realistically go to the gym. I made up for this by working from the flat with the TV on in the background.
Given the amount of time we’ve been back it’s remarkable how quickly it’s all gone to pot. If past performance is a guide to the future I suspect we’ll be back on the chocolate croissants for breakfast and sugar runs in just a few days. Actually, thinking about it, it’s the CTO meeting tomorrow morning, and they provide chocolate croissants at that…
Day 45: Variety is the spice of life
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Thursday, 8th January 2015 00:43 |
One of the advantages of being CTO is I get to see the “big picture”, which is a crappy management way of saying “I understand why it is we’re all going to charge in this direction for half a day when previously we’d all been charging over there”. Sadly knowing why we’re doing it doesn’t make it any less disruptive, which is why we generally try to avoid it.
Of course, trying to avoid it is pretty much mutually exclusive to being a startup where you’re, almost by definition, trying to do too much with too few resource.
Depending on how you measure it today was a resounding success, with updates to all our open source projects, a funky Zendesk plugin submitted to their app store for review, and a shiny new company blog post written and up. Oh, and this mornings CTO meeting was a good laugh too, just for good measure. On top of that I’d also done some research into how well Rainbird would scale, specifically in the context of running as an appliance in the enterprise. Sadly this threw up a few questions that pointed to some problems in our new object model. The fixes for this, which didn’t take too long to work out, required changing some of the code I’d been knee deep in for the past week or so. We discovered all this right around the time I had to take my head out of that space and go concentrate on some of the other things I needed to do today. Not great timing.
So yes, by some measures, today was an abject failure with me finally leaving the office near midnight with the shattered remains of my code lying in pieces all over the place. Hopefully later today (because it’s now the wee hours of the morning) I can get my head back into that space for an undisturbed few hours and put everything back together again, but right this time. If I manage that I’ll be where I wanted to be Monday evening. I can’t even remember what it was I wanted to achieve Tuesday…
Day 46: The brutal truth
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Friday, 9th January 2015 00:15 |
It’s Thursday, so All Hands day. Turns out yesterday was the half way mark, so it’s the downhill run now until demo day. All Hands will now be dedicated towards rehearsing and polishing our presentations. Hopefully we’ll continue to have the founder stories afterwards as I find these to be really useful.
The founder stories can be very open and honest, so I’m not going to mention names for tonight’s session or recount any of the amusing stories that were told. The talk was a hysterical look at how you can royally cock things up with team and culture without even realising you’re doing it. At points it could nearly be entitled “how to kill a startup”.
Given most people hear “startup” and think the multi-billion dollar success stories it can be easy to forget that for every Facebook there are hundreds, if not thousands of companies that have failed for some reason. Creating a startup is hard and hearing others say “you know what, we found it really hard too, but we’re doing OK now” reminds you that you’re not alone - everyone finds it hard because it is hard.
Day 47: Making progress
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Friday, 9th January 2015 19:53 |
Week 7 draws to a close with my code being no further along, in terms of functionality, than it was when I started. In terms of how it’s structured and what it can support, however, it’s progressed in leaps and bounds. I’m now at a stage where I no longer feel like I’m faking it when it comes to the core of Rainbird. I know how it works, how it thinks and I know what we can make it do - both what it’s currently capable of, and what we could do with more people, money and time.
Now you may ask why a CTO has only just got to this point, but you’ve got to understand that we’re taking something that’s been over a decade in the making, written in a language I barely understand by someone who has a huge amount of knowledge in the problem domain. It’s not just a question of joining a startup, getting the code handed over to you and then getting up to speed with NodeJS. That was the easy bit. We completed that by about week 1. The rest was learning all the disparate fields and disciplines needed to understand how everything works. And even that I’ve only done to a basic level. I could spend years learning the idiosyncrasies.
If Rainbird were easy to create everyone would be doing it. Building this type of tech well is hard; it’s why, historically, it’s been so expensive to do. It’s why we fervently believe that Rainbird will succeed. Companies can use Rainbird to avoid precisely what I’ve been through in order to help write it, and what’s really cool is we’re now starting to see companies do exactly that.
Day 49: Breaking point
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Sunday, 11th January 2015 20:19 |
For those not paying attention (or for those who haven’t been reading the entire story) my family live in North Norfolk and consist of my heavily pregnant wife, 3 year old daughter, 3 mice and some fish. The journey home is 3.5 hours and entails about 30 minutes of walking and two trains. On a bad day it’s around 5 hours and involves buses as well. Today is a bad day.
Before going to Techstars I researched the hell out of it. One thing that is made abundantly clear is that if you have a family or partner, they are going to suffer. With that in mind I set expectations with my wife to be low. Very low. Like 5 minute video call once a day and back home every other weekend at best low. Unsurprisingly this caused an argument, but not a major one. I was the first to admit I was being horribly selfish, and the hoped for outcome benefits the entire family hugely. We both understand that.
So my heavily pregnant wife (due on the 18th of March) is effectively a single mum for 3 months with flying visits from me for 48 hours at a time every two weeks or so. Not insurmountable, many wives have endured that, but not exactly easy either. It seems this departure was the breaking point.
I don’t know if it’s the fact I’ve recently been home for 2 weeks, so she’s got used to me being home again, or if it’s the fact that I’m away for 4 weeks this time and we’re not seeing each other until my wife and daughter visit me in London in 2 weeks time, or if it’s the constant goodbye’s and the fleeting visits, or if it’s all of the above, but today’s goodbye was tearful.
I now get to throw myself into work with no time to think about anything else. My wife has to keep the house and family together for my return. All I can say is that if your partner bears up as well as mine you’re onto a keeper there.