Two articles I read this week have inspired the heck out of me. The first was by Jared Turner of thoughtbot with the punchy title “WIP is waste”. Jared described how zero value is delivered to the users of your software until it is shipped. The longer code changes remain on your machine, the more pure cost it is to the organization. Those words have been ringing in my head for days, and I have personal experience to confirm their truth.

Nothing kills motivation than being stuck in a “code hole”. You know you’re in a code hole when you have 100+ type errors to fix, tests are not passing, you are “refactoring” something distantly related to what you set out to do, and the diff from main is so big the PR is unreviewable.

I’ve been there many times. It takes persistent effort to resist digging myself into one of these. I must remind myself to stop, focus on something small and ship it. It feels good! Get that little improvement out into the world. Take a small step toward the big vision.

Ship that code.

The second article was about the journey of my favorite web analytics company, Plausible. They began in 2018. They raised zero dollars. They spent zero dollars on marketing. They simply wrote blogs. They were open and honest about everything. They had an ethic to their business practices, and it paid off. Their team of 4 made a million bucks in 2022 when the post was written. I love hearing stories like this. It’s exactly how I am going to grow and build Tend, my simple budgeting software.

“I’ll write my way out!” is what Hamilton sang in his musical and it’s true for software startups over 200 years later. Put another link on the internet.

Publish that post.