Chanel_Bunnell

Many of them do.

Writing lots of code quickly is not a good thing. You shouldn’t be writing more than a few lines of code per day. And if your editor is helping you write a lot of code really quickly, it’s encouraging you to write bad code.

Here speaks a man who has never worked on a green field project, never built something from start to finish, never had to write more than a few lines of code a day.

How many programmers would it take to build a new version 1 product if they're all writing just a few lines of code a day? Would 10,000 do the trick, with six months to finish? There's a time to talk, discuss, prepare, plan, draw stuff on whiteboards, etc. And then there's the other time, when you sit down and build the product, which means writing all the code.

I'm not talking about an app that displays a random number, in which case, fire away with your few lines a day, and you'll be up and running in a few days. I'm talking about products with a capital P.

I'm starting the coding work on a new version of an existing product the week after next, and I'll be spending 15 solid 8 hour days writing code. I've made the plans, sat in the meetings, tossed more than half the features over board. And now comes the time to actually build it -- or at least, a first iteration of it before I get hit with user feedback.

Feedbin doesn't have a trial period. Is that right, or am I missing it? Credit card up front seems a bit harsh.

I recognise myself in your story. I took off with a backpack before the ink had dried on my last exam paper. I look back on those years now, 15 years later, and wish I'd had the courage to walk off earlier. In retrospect, it's obvious to me that everything I learned at university I learned in year 1. The remaining years were simply "finishing what I started" because a "degree is good to have."

We're all different, and we all get different things from formal education. If it's not for you, do your future self a favour and don't waste the time.

Nothing personal, but that simply tells me that you're not an entrepreneur.

I'm four months into a new corporate job after running into financial problems towards the end of last year. I didn't shut my business down, but things had gotten very dicey financially, making it necessary to get a regular pay check. I don't do much work on my own business these days (desktop, not web, and few support issues to handle), but I do have one product released late last year that is starting to show real promise.

The day job is driving me nuts. I thought at first that I could easily give it a year and a half, but now I'm counting the days to when the financial mess will have cleared up enough to resign - 2 more months. Maybe it's the company I'm working for (evil banking software), but more likely it's me. I have great difficulty working for someone else on one small part of a huge, 10 year old product.

Over the past 4 months I've drawn up a detailed plan for the new product that I released last year, and I'm sure it's going to work (heard that before). Roll on July 1st. I feel bad about the company I'm now working for, knowing that I'll be resigning soon and that I'm effectively using them, but not bad enough to stay.