On sacrifices
verylargebox took almost 3 years before its public release on the 20th of July 2013. 978* days to be exact.
Picture a box — verylargebox (@verylargebox) November 18, 2010
The actual time was around 6 months based on a 40h/week schedule. This is taking an idea existing solely in a couple of spoken words all the way to an app tangible by anyone. Once the release date had been set the last month turned really challenging. Ensure everything falls into place, communicate with both a designer to visually enrich the app and a video production company for the video promo, “recruit” testers to drive the app before submitting.
You might be wondering what about the 30 months of overhead? Well, that’s having a 9-5, suffering from 3 burnouts of 3-6-6 months, taking care of loved ones, dealing with personal matters, trying to have a social life.
Making something from scratch is tough; both mentally and physically. You skip the gym, you stop eating healthy, you pull all nighters, you start ignoring friends, you loose touch with the outside world, you effectively sit on a chair and ignore everything coming your way. You have to make personal sacrifices along the way as you must put the hours; there is no way around it.
The truth is that verylargebox would have possibly taken even more time to build if it wasn’t for the myriad QA on StackOverflow, the dozens of blog posts and tutorials available and the open source community.
Yet, it’s not only about writing software. It’s about achieving your dreams and aspirations, saving that extra weekend to be with loved ones, taking care of yourself, moving the whole industry forward one step at a time.
It is for those reasons that have open sourced 3 libraries (VLBCameraView, VLBScrollView, VLBAlertViews) and have already described residence based authentication that the box is made of.
verylargebox would probably have failed had it not be for all the support from friends. An encouraging talk, that snippet of code, the long conversation after midnight, putting you back on track, doing the chores for you, pushing you to do better. Even questioning the very thing that you do, forcing you to put things into perspective and keep the faith.
Thank you Maria, Leonida, Sam C, Keith, Andrew, Guy, Mike, Yaniv, Sam E, Stephanie, Bryan, George P, Aristoteli, Mark R, Ali, Colin, Philip, Jon, Matt, Max, Michali, Niko S, Pari, Pano, Taso, Jamie, Brian. Without you verylargebox would not have been real today.
The road ahead is even tougher. Hope to find the strength to pull it off.
.-
Note: “hg init” happened 3 days earlier.