I’m a noob programmer. I designed my company’s MVP, but it was built by my cofounder. Him and his team did a kick ass job, and we have what I think is the best audio messenger in the market.
For a couple reasons I’ve decided to start contributing to developing products. The first is our speed to launch new features will increase. We’re a small distributed team right now, and are using a dev shop in India to add new features. We manage this using an agile methodology and it worked great for building an MVP. Now, I want to be faster. I want to tweak design, content, and add features much faster. It is imperative we test as much as we can with our customers right now, and the dev cycle with agile was too slow. (Coming from larger startups I know that sounds insane.) The fact is though, we use flutter and their hot-reload feature allows us to experiment and test insanely fast. The reason I am contributing to our development is AI.
There are great AI tools to help people program. From chat-gpt to code llama, it’s awesome the power people have now to develop applications. I am going to dive into this and share what I learn. Today I set up my dev environment and got boomering running on my computer. Interestingly, that required a lot of googling and included tasks that AI could not help with. Those tasks were mostly figuring out why I was getting errors when using different software packages together. I had to downgrade several packages to get everything working smoothly together. So, interestingly, human experience still matters. Now though, that were up and running, I’m excited to dive into the code assistants. My goal is to be a junior level programmer by the end of the year. Let’s see.
As a newcomer to the world of programming, I find myself in a unique position. While I conceptualized my company’s Minimum Viable Product (MVP), it was my co-founder and a Dev shop who executed it brilliantly. We now boast what I believe to be the market’s finest audio messaging platform.
Recently, I made the strategic decision to actively participate in our product development process. There are a couple of key motivations behind this shift. First and foremost, it’s about expediting our ability to introduce new features, content, and copy. Currently, we are a small distributed team and our collaboration with a development agency in India to implement new functionalities works well. While our agile approach served us well in crafting our MVP, we need to achieve even greater speed. My aim is to refine designs, content, and integrate features at a much faster pace. Given we now have a large* group of customers to conduct extensive customer testing, the traditional development cycle of agile is too slow. I know this sounds crazy to those coming from larger startups, but when you’re small, I’ve found it to be true. Additionally, the use of Flutter, with its hot-reload feature, allows us to experiment and test with speed.
The second reason I’m diving into the code is the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI tools are now available to assist individuals in programming tasks. From Chat-GPT to Code Llama, the capabilities at our disposal to create applications are awe-inspiring. Today I set up my development environment and successfully configured Boomerang on my computer. It’s worth noting that this journey involved areas where AI couldn’t offer assistance. Most of my challenges revolved around debugging and compatibility issues between various software packages. Human experience and human willingness to write about these problems was the only reason I was able to get boomering to work. What did people do before stack overflow??
My ultimate goal is to attain a senior-level proficiency in programming by year-end. It’s an ambitious aspiration, but I’m excited to see where this journey takes me.
Let’s go.