Me: Leo, what did you do at school today?
Leo: Uh… Guhd.
Me: Leo, that’s great that school was good, but what did you do?
Leo: Uh… I pway’d wiv bwocks!
Me: Cool! Did you build a tower?
Leo: yaaaah!
Me: That’s great! Who did you play with?
Leo: Uh… I–owh-oh [translation: i don’t know]
Ok…
It was a little over nine months ago when I was sitting in parent’s house with my brother/boss sitting next to me as I was drawing on 5 yellow pieces of graph paper that still exist in my backpack today, the outlines for what was to be an EPIC application. I recall, ‘designing’ it waaay too big for what we needed at first, but this app was to be EPIC as it was a replacement for what we could not do with trello (no offense to trello of course!).
So it had to have been mid July-ish of last year when I wrote the first lines of code for EPIC. It looked a lot like our other Clean Coders app, Poker… But in those following months, i finagled with the css and the cljs and turned it into something that might have appeared to look like a cousin to Poker with different functionality that could also talk to & hear from Poker–a year prior to that, I was struggling to make a simple gui for a simple tic-tac-toe–and I’m laughing at myself.
By December of last year, EPIC was a ‘usable’ app–not public-ready yet, certainly not at our standards, but we were using it internally–or at least I was…. And for not having had a design team working with me at all through this point, I was pretty happy with its functionality–with the exception of the Dragon Drops which were shat everywhere and frequently lost stories…
It was early January when my efforts were re-cast from EPIC to a new customer project–a monetary project–from both the standpoint that we were being paid for it and it was a money-dealing company. I don’t think that I have to say that this means big liability and responsibility.
Thus, I was going to have to leave EPIC in the hands of others.
Deep breath…
It wasn’t hard actually–I was worried it might be.
I quickly became buckled down into a much more challenging project with real dollars behind it. And I was nervous… Their legacy code was in a language that I was familiar with, but wasn’t awesome at, and it was legacy code… that means unknown bugs (and while I’m fascinated by ants; I’m terrified of wasps) and it was practically untested (aka no wasp spray laid out).
I could go on about the new project and my fear of wasps or how interesting i think ants (and actually also wasps…) are, but this post is about EPIC and how proud I am of what it was and what it has become!
I’ve been on projects prior to EPIC, where there’s been a hand off, and while sometimes t’s a relief to get rid of the responsibility of a project, there are other times, like with EPIC, where there can be a little grief about relinquishing the power of it.
I did not have that hard of a time with this, but it did cross my mind… In end, from my experience with stepping down from EPIC, I would thus advise any developer to try giving up the power to more minds, if you have the opportunity, to build it further and bigger. Beautiful things can happen when you do!
Since I’ve stepped away, while the overall intent and core functionality that I originally implemented exists, the team has taken the app and lifted it higher than I’d imagined it would go. It’s beautiful!
I chuckled when I saw that they’d even implemented some of my “too long-term” ideas from last July without prior knowledge of those ideas, but simply because they were envisioning the same ‘dream’ that I’d originally had for it. I’ll also add that they’ve probably implemented many of the ideas (mine and theirs) in a nicer way than I would have because I was only one mind and they have more collaboration behind it–or maybe they are much smarter and creative than I–it’s one of those things..
All this to say, that watching my first app coming to life through the fingers of others has been such a cool experience, and I hope that they all own it as much as I do–as it is just as much theirs as it once was mine (that was a lot of as’s..). But seriously, I am EPIC proud of my team and they should be EPIC proud too!
This is probably an experience I should take with me through life and into motherhood when it comes to letting my boys go and build their own lives once they no longer need me–they too will do fine and will probably build bigger than I dream for them or could build should I stand in their way… sigh