Were you busy coding your heart out?
by Aarjav Trivedi
“Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were an entrepreneur by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was entrepreneurship ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, elegant piece of code when you died. You won’t be asked if your startup built an app or an operating system, if it was social or mobile, on TechCrunch or on Hacker News. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one company you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished. I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy coding your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to code that you’ve been a user long before you were ever an entrepreneur. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a user, what piece of software in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to use if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and code the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.”
Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you shipping a something, an anything, an app, a website, a server, that was really and truly after your own heart.
With apologies to J.D. Salinger
N.B. If you are writing software to make a living, not just for the pleasure of it, you should also talk to your users. Lots of them.
