For a long time, I built everything in private. Private repos. Quiet ideas. "Not ready yet."
I told myself I was being disciplined. Thoughtful. Strategic.
In reality, I was hiding.
The OneStoply Failure
Last year, I spent three months building OneStoply, a "LinkedIn for Blue Collar workers."
I treated it like a job. I scoped it. I architected it. I polished the UI. I worried about edge cases. I protected the code from the world until it was "perfect."
It died of scope creep and a total lack of interest.
I spent 90 days optimizing a product that nobody wanted. I was not building a business; I was practicing my hobby of writing code in a vacuum.
The Corporate Trap
I know exactly why I did this.
I am a Staff Engineer. I have spent 15 years in the corporate game. In that world, a two-week sprint to "move a button to the left" is considered work.
Monday: Move the button left.
Friday: Management decides to move it right.
Wednesday: We pause to deliberate if we even need the button.
In the corporate world, that feels like progress. You get paid to be careful. You get paid to deliberate.
I brought that mindset into the Founder game, and it almost killed my ambition.
In the corporate world, "Quality" means unit tests, architecture, and consensus. In the Founder world, "Quality" means solving a problem for a human being.
If you spend three months writing clean code for zero users, you have not built quality. You have built waste.
The Pivot: Speed > Ego
I am a 3rd generation Software Engineer. I have nearly 1.5 decades of experience. But if you looked at my public GitHub profile yesterday, you would see a ghost town.
That is disgusting.
I realized I was using my "seniority" as an excuse to procrastinate. I was afraid to ship "half-assed" code because I identified as a "Senior Engineer."
I am deleting that identity.
From now on, the only thing that matters is shipping. Speed over elegance. Quantity over perfection. Reality over theory.
The 365-Day Commitment
Talk is cheap. Blog posts are easy.
Here is the protocol: 365 Days of Green.
I am committing to a meaningful code contribution to my repositories every single day for the next year.
- No "fixing typos in the README."
- No "adjusting whitespace."
- Real code. Real features. Real shipping.
I am done building in the dark. I am done optimizing for an audience of zero.
If I ship broken code, so be it. At least it is real.