
How Kuwait and Me, a small startup that I built to spread the joy of giving, died - enamakel
http://steven.pw/work/2015/11/05/kuwait-me/
======
epalmer
>Even if you don’t create the final product with all it’s amazing features and
sparkly buttons; if you have at least something out there that works, then
there’s always room for improvement. Over the period of 6 months, I’ve revised
the design about 5 times, changed the entire framework twice and had to
completely erase and restart the database thrice. If I had continued to
improve with I had in the beginning then I could have reached much further
ahead. Furthermore, if I had continued with whatever I had, it would still
have been better than nothing.

I'm not sure he articulated this point well. But if I understand what he is
saying, he should have improved on what he had not recoded the database
interface and the framework.

I would like to understand what drove him to redo so many pieces instead of
incrementally improve the system.

~~~
enamakel
Yes, you're right.

When I was made the first version I used PHP with codeigniter and used
Backbone on the frontend. Which was okay for the beginning but I convinced
myself that it wouldn't scale well in the long run. After reading about
Node.js and it's advantages on scalability and performance over PHP, I
switched the backend to use MongoDB and Node. And this happened over and over
again, on many different things.

Basically, I was convinced that switching harder technologies and redesigning
the UI should be done immediately and will help in the long run, because
continuing with what I have now will prove difficult to change in the future.
I didn't looked at it as a product but rather I looked at it technically
(performance mainly).

But that was wrong, as I realized later on (in the hard way, when I ended up
with big complicated mess).

I also want to blame my inner-desire to change everything; often I get bored
with things looking the same way and hence I end up redesigning the entire UX
just to keep myself content. (Which is a horrible thing to do when it comes to
going to production; I wonder if anyone has been in the same boat as me?)

~~~
epalmer
I don't do UI code but backend systems. Basically ETL and Middleware adapters
and the like. I have the tendency to want to keep working the code to make it
better. I have however found that my code usually works well long before the I
get to the stop fiddling point. I don't work in a team that supports my code,
it is just myself. So it is all about my own meter to gauge when to stop
tweaking.

