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It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

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Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#21

Post by davnicwil »

notjustanymike wrote: post #18

I've gotten pretty close with two 4 months projects this year (2 weeks off in both cases). It took two weeks of planning, research, and understanding roadblocks to get to that point. It's doable, really, and it feels an awful lot like waterfall when you're in the moment. The most important steps were: 1. Write it down 2. Don't keep it to yourself Everyone else is smarter than me and provided immeasurably good feedbac…

2 is really helpful, 100% agree.

I shared my deadlines and progress on this build via the blog and on twitter under @zero_startup and I would say doing that probably pushed me to ship the MVP at least 50% faster.

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#22

Post by gnrl »

davnicwil wrote: post #19

OP here - this is a sidebar but the HN hug was making the page load really slowly (~10s for me) even though the blog part of the site is cached. Anyway, because I'm using kubernetes all it took to fix it was bumping the nodes in my cluster, 4x the replicas, kubectl apply and it's snappy again! All done in about a minute. What an awesome tool kubernetes is.

Try to add autoscaling. You shouldn't be doing it manual :-)

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#23

Post by thijsvandien »

henryfjordan wrote: post #15
danpalmer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to break it down until it’s all trivial. That process takes time itself, but you can estimate that much more easily. I’ve recently found I end up giving an estimate of, say, 2 days to get a solid estimate, and then come away from that with 2-5 weeks of tasks that are no more than a day each. Estimates of a day are pretty accurate (for me). Another approach I had some success with was estimating the 80% l…

You cannot, by definition, break down a non-trivial project into trivial parts without having at least 1 non-trivial part in there somewhere

The non-trivial part might be combining the trivial parts. :)

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#24

Post by joeblau »

davnicwil wrote: post #19

OP here - this is a sidebar but the HN hug was making the page load really slowly (~10s for me) even though the blog part of the site is cached. Anyway, because I'm using kubernetes all it took to fix it was bumping the nodes in my cluster, 4x the replicas, kubectl apply and it's snappy again! All done in about a minute. What an awesome tool kubernetes is.

The first time my site ended up on HN, I set up Cloudflare because this community blew my site off the internet pretty quickly.

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#25

Post by davnicwil »

mtlynch wrote: post #17

Interesting writeup! Thanks for sharing. >Seems easy right - it's a CLI - just document every option and you're done in half a day. That's what I thought too. >But then you realise that each individual option is its own thing that requires thought to explain, and crucially, interacts with all other options. It's not enough to explain it in isolation. You need to tie everything together. You need examples. You realise…

Thanks! And thanks for the link, I'll give that a read.

On the 'get it in front of a customer' thing - I agree and struggled with this decision a bit after I'd made it as a result. Probably the best way to validate you're building the wrong thing, or it's not ready yet, is hearing 'no' and hopefully why.

Super interesting factor in this case though is that basically I am the customer - it's really a product I'm building because I want it to exist. I asked myself the question, would I honestly pay for this right now? The answer was no. So at least for customer number one, me, I did kind of have that answer. Maybe cheating a bit though :-)

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#26

Post by davnicwil »

gnrl wrote: post #22
davnicwil wrote: post #19

OP here - this is a sidebar but the HN hug was making the page load really slowly (~10s for me) even though the blog part of the site is cached. Anyway, because I'm using kubernetes all it took to fix it was bumping the nodes in my cluster, 4x the replicas, kubectl apply and it's snappy again! All done in about a minute. What an awesome tool kubernetes is.

Try to add autoscaling. You shouldn't be doing it manual :-)

Yeah, you're totally right and I actually will now! Infra wasn't ready at all for the HN hug. I think I'd had at most 20 simultaneous connections prior to this!

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#27

Post by salty_biscuits »

danpalmer wrote: post #7
commandlinefan wrote: post #2

I can’t accurately estimate non-trivial software. I’ve never met anybody who can accurately estimate non-trivial software. I’ve never seen anybody claim to be able to accurately estimate non-trivial software. Yet for some reason people still insist that estimating non-trivial software is not only possible, but trivial.

The trick is to break it down until it’s all trivial. That process takes time itself, but you can estimate that much more easily. I’ve recently found I end up giving an estimate of, say, 2 days to get a solid estimate, and then come away from that with 2-5 weeks of tasks that are no more than a day each. Estimates of a day are pretty accurate (for me). Another approach I had some success with was estimating the 80% l…

Think about how variance propagates through that chain of work though,especially for tasks that are contingent on other tasks...

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#28

Post by mikepalmer »

"What's the idea for Box CI? A CI service that does everything for you, except for running the builds."

Marketing advice: define "CI" near the top of the first page. The word "Integration" is not on the page either. I am familiar with Continuous Integration but not the abbreviation CI.

Adding to the confusion, the font on (most of) the home page is sans serif, so CI cee-eye looks like Cl cee-ell.

Moreover, you mention CLI on the page... though I did know what that is!

Good luck with it.

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#29

Post by eyegor »

> Sometimes it takes a conversation with someone else unfamiliar with your work to really question your fundamental principles

This is one of my favorite tools for development. I always sketch out an idea (no coding) and then try to describe it to someone with zero CS background before diving into an mvp. The times when I didn't follow this process - well - just as op described while trying to document the cli, I basically wrote the damn thing 2-3x over. So instead of a couple hours of chatting with other people, I had to spend days/weeks running in circles around my own work. Please, if you have juniors or if you are a junior, try to drive this lesson in.

Re: It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3

#30

Post by bradknowles »

danpalmer wrote: post #7
commandlinefan wrote: post #2

I can’t accurately estimate non-trivial software. I’ve never met anybody who can accurately estimate non-trivial software. I’ve never seen anybody claim to be able to accurately estimate non-trivial software. Yet for some reason people still insist that estimating non-trivial software is not only possible, but trivial.

The trick is to break it down until it’s all trivial. That process takes time itself, but you can estimate that much more easily. I’ve recently found I end up giving an estimate of, say, 2 days to get a solid estimate, and then come away from that with 2-5 weeks of tasks that are no more than a day each. Estimates of a day are pretty accurate (for me). Another approach I had some success with was estimating the 80% l…

Breaking it down until it's all trivial is the most non-trivial part of the exercise.

If everyone could do that trivially, then there would never be any problems.

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