Last month I set out to build a new product, and after a full week I had shipped exactly zero features.
Not because I was slow. Not because the work was hard. Because before anyone could write a single line of business logic, my team had to re-decide a dozen things our company should have settled years ago.
I've been a full-stack developer for almost five years — long enough to have worn most of the hats: WordPress developer, QA, frontend, backend, solution architect, founding engineer. I've built more than twenty web applications and a handful of mobile ones. Some of them I'm genuinely proud of: systems that poll PLCs every five seconds to watch over industrial equipment, a cybersecurity dashboard that mapped attacks across the world in real time using tree-based graphs, an OTT platform that streamed live events — including FIFA — to millions of concurrent viewers. Today I work on enterprise supply-chain finance software.
So when I tell you the hardest part of that new product had nothing to do with code, I know how it sounds. Let me explain.
The week that disappeared
