Blogature

If you had met us five weeks ago, and asked us “So, when will you have something I can play with?” we probably would have said “Should be about two weeks.” Then, if you ran into us a restaurant a two weeks later and asked the same question, you might have been surprised to hear that, in fact, we were still two weeks away. It’s felt like a pattern for us. Talking with other founders, this seems to be a common feeling.

Here at the Thinkature Underground Lair, we have a conundrum. How can we explain this pattern? It seems to us there are two ways this could happen. Either the finish line is moving (we’re doing a bad job at freezing our feature lists) or we are really bad judges of how long it takes get tasks done.

I’m fond of the second explanation. It’s been well known in software engineering for quite some time that software engineers are particularly bad judges of how long it takes to get work done. In my favorite quote about programming EVAR from Mythical Man Month, Frederick Brooks deploys the awesome-insight-mobile:

“Computer programming … creates with an exceedingly tractable medium. The programmer builds from pure thought-stuff: concepts and very flexible representations thereof. Because the medium is tractable, we expect few difficulties in implementation; hence our pervasive optimism. Because our ideas are faulty, we have bugs; hence our optimism is unjustified.” (p 22)

I think this is basically an apt description of what happens. In building Thinkature, I’ve felt like the problem is really one of detail. When I’m far away from a problem (like I was when I said “Oh, yeah, it’ll be easy to build an invitation system” last week) I didn’t really appreciate in a practical sense what that was going to entail. The more involved I got with it, the more clear it became what an undertaking it would be. On a larger scale, this looks like asymptotically approaching launch. Any task that’s kinda far in the future shrinks in size, but grows as you get closer and closer.

This is compounded, for me, by a separation of tasks that are technically challenging (like the networking layer) and those that are sort of menial (user registration), I tend to assume the technically challenging tasks will take a long time, but the less challenging ones will get done quickly. So it seems to me like it’s not that the finish line was really moving on us, but that as we just sort of zoomed in on it over time, always getting half way there, but never finally making it…

Still, we have made it somewhere. We’re really proud of the version of Thinkature that’s available now, and can’t wait to hear what people think about it. And, I’m pleased to point out, even though our perpetual two-weeks-away predictions were mostly wrong, we did manage to almost nail our original summer plan of a friends and family launch on July 12. Probably luck, but still, it makes us feel good.