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Far less glamorous than I may have led you to believe so far, startups grow more from one’s failures than one’s pre-existing knowledge. It’s one thing to read the latest 37signals mantra, and quite another to create something that won’t pee its own pants when pressured. In liu of the all-encompassing list of lessons learned (which will come later), here are a few bite-sized chunks to whet your appetite in the meantime:

1.) Assume it will all change

Never spend more time than necessary to make something perfect. It will NOT be worth it. Ever. Things change. Roll with it. Fast, flexible, and far-from-finished is light-years ahead of perfect. Perfect can’t handle the list of modifications it gets two minutes after it completed the feature. Perfect gets frustrated and wastes time thinking about how perfect it was. Perfect defies the very point of it being a startup (let alone an alpha release). I think you get the point.

2.) Too much flexibility makes things too hard

If you’ve designed your app to be so flexible that it could mutate from an online service to a social network overnight, you’ve likely screwed something up. Make educated assumptions about your approach; you need a consistent foundation. At least that way you could do a mass find/replace when you decide to change. Decide the approach that makes your life easiest (and with healthy regard for both the present and the future, no less) and setup functions and objects that corner yourself into maintaining that approach. My motto is this: if it’s so flexible that it could do anything, then it does nothing now.

3.) Be straightforward, not clever

Sure this applies at many levels, but I am specifically referring to coding practices. Sure you might find some cute way of shortening a function to 10 lines of code, but you still have to remember how it works later. Not only that, but you provide better value to the product if someone else can easily decipher how it works. Forget job security; when you’re done, you’ll want to stay done.

Well, now I have list of bugs to iron out, and the caching mechanism could use some optimizations. This is fun; I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

1. Questions are good

People don’t usually take offense or feel judged when you ask questions. If anything, they judge themselves with the answer. The one caveat, though, is with pointed questions. It’s quite easy to ask qurstions that imply a certain answer, so people could still get offended/defensive. Our conclusion is that the question should never be to trap the person, but only to get the person to ask the question for himself/herself.

2. Conformity and Rebellion are not opposites.

I enjoy paradoxical questions, so consider this: if all the cool kids are rebelling, then are they conformists or rebels? If conformity and rebellion are mutually exclusive, then people will usually respond with a wholehearted “it depends on your perspective.” Many people argue that these people would be simultaneously rebelling and conforming, depending on your perspective. My friend and I concluded, however, that non-conformity isn’t necessarily rebellion, and, conversely, non-rebellion isn’t necessarily conformity. There are actually four camps, not two. There are conformists, non-conformists, rebels, and non-rebels. (You have to be either smoking something or be a philosophy major to figure this stuff out. Luckily for our reputations, my friend just so happens to be the latter.)

3. Life’s short; devote yourself to something worthwhile

Not many things are worthy of a life, so why are so many people careless with how they “spend” their own life? My friend and I concluded that each person should devote himself/herself to something worthwhile. Some people spend years preparing; others seem to have the Midas touch, where everything they do is worthwhile. Still others accomplish things as simultaneously respectable and worthless as winning eight Olympic gold medals.

Regardless, do something worth doing. There seems to be a shortage of clean air, water, and food in the world; what have you done with yours?

I’m trying to learn two different design patterns concurrently. One reflects itself in this pseudo-environment(-ish) web page you find yourself viewing at this very moment; the other is the MVC pattern found in Ruby on Rails. If neither of those means anything to you, don’t worry; we can still be friends (*crosses fingers* [ in the "I'm hopeful" sort of way--not the "Just kidding" one] ).

Regardless, leave it to goofy programmers to come up with goofier acronyms. Seriously. DRY = Don’t Repeat Yourself. CRUD = Create, Retrieve, Update, & Delete. I mean don’t get me wrong; it’s great stuff that’s taken even the geniuses decades to perfect. The best part is you wish that every last solitary line of code you’ve ever written will, well, commit suicide. It now pales in comparison. That’s why I like finishing projects quickly. I don’t like to be reminded of how much I’ve learned since the beginning of this very project. That’s no fun. I’d rather just phase it out of the portfolio. No one will ever know…

Speaking of portfolio, this new site is meant to allow me to focus on a variety of interests. I like to write, so here’s a blog for you (and maybe I’ll add books later on–who knows?). I like music, so I’ll give you a taste of that as it comes. I’ll keep a very limited showing of web projects due to the nature of them sucking so quickly after they’re done. Yay for the ever-increasing status quo.

Well, as always, your thoughts are welcome. Don’t worry if I’ll accept what you have to say; I most certainly will. Remember–I’m a programmer; usually the thinking-someone’s-a-nerd thing goes the other way.