Chores may not be glamorous, but they’ve got to be done, or else the pile will keep growing. It’s like when the trash doesn’t get picked up for a few weeks. Normally, it’s out of sight, out of mind, but if it stops for a while, you’ll notice!
That’s what my current work on TILT’s Time Machine feels like: Making room for the new, removing the cruft and polishing every surface along the way. To get Time Machine ready for its big next steps, we first need to improve its tech underpinnings – I don’t want to bore you with details, though I’d love to talk about it for hours, so let’s just say that we’re removing some things that were great in the beginning and allowed us to prove the idea and now we’re growing into adolescence and preparing for bigger things.
When you meet someone you start by introducing yourself, a web app works a little bit like it: You start by logging in. You enter your email and password. It seems like a mundane step, but it has to be taken seriously: You don’t want someone else to impersonate you, you don’t want to lose someone’s password while also not making it so complicated, that an interested person loses interest before they even start.
I started by reworking our login component first, because a) it’s a complicated aspect and b) more importantly you need to log in first. When you jump into a software project that you haven’t worked on before, there is a lot of unknowns: How is this structured? If I can this thing, will it still work? What does this do and why is it here? Not getting overwhelmed and keeping on it, peeling layer by layer – or as often said in the software trade “shaving the yak” – and you’ll get there, even if it doesn’t feel certain at all.
When finally, several days in, it finally accepted my password and asked me about my physical health, I jumped out of my office chair and cheered a little. Even more so when I realized that in the background my information had been transferred correctly to the new system and I could continue. Relief.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but the fog is lifting and I feel more confident to take bigger steps. I hope the next time you hear from me, we’ll be ready for new things.
(This text was written while listening to Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”, but not while at an airport.)