Why Moving Fast Matters (even if it fails) | Day in the Life of a Software Engineer

So if someone taught me this one thing, I truly believe that I would be better off compared to where I am now. So I've mentioned in previous videos where I've seen a lot of people build apps, and that's basically what inspired me to build apps myself. But I truly believe that there's this one thing that determines if an app gets built and launched. And the one thing is this, it's how fast you move. So in this video, I wanna share with you guys the importance of moving fast and delivering, even though you may fail, and how that's changed the way that I work now, and give you guys a status update on the app that I'm currently building. But first, as always, gotta get some caffeine in. So before I share with you guys why speed matters, I wanna share with you guys the progress of my app and give you guys just an insight of where I'm at. This is what it's looking like so far. So the app that I'm currently building is a focused time management Chrome extension that is following the Pomodoro time management method. And the purpose of this app is to help people stay focused and undistracted in certain time blocks because personally for me, I found that I was always distracted, especially in college when I really needed to get work done and study. And there was a time in college where I got my first D on a Calc 30 test, and that was a really serious wake-up call for me because I never really got anything lower than like a 70. And so getting a D on a pretty big test was a wake-up call for me, and I really needed to understand the material and devote time to study. And through the studying, I found that the Pomodoro time management method worked best for me to have focused time blocks as well as take some needed breaks throughout the study session. I also think that this is a pretty simple app to build, and with it being my first app that I'll be launching, it's a project to ease my way into the realm of app development. There are a bunch of Pomodoro apps. I downloaded six apps here to help me brainstorm some ideas of how I want it to look like and design the look and feel of the application. I essentially went through each of these apps, found its core features, and jotted some notes down that I liked, and I wanted to bring all those cool features together in the app that I'm building. So now let me share with you guys the prototype that I've built so far. I did all the prototypes and designs in Figma here. So an inspiration that I took from the apps that I've downloaded was the categories section. And so the idea here is that you can create new categories to specify what your focus time is about. And so this is one of the flows of creating a new category. You click this arrow sign, which will bring you to this page, click the new category button, and a modal will pop up with the category name to enter, as well as the duration. After that, you click add, and it will create, for example, this one. It's a reading focus session. And once you click on that one, it will bring you back to the main page with 30 minutes on the timer. Have the category as your selected reading one, where you can start your focus reading time. Here's some other flows that I created, such as changing the focus duration timer, pausing and stopping your focus time, and taking breaks as well. Here's another flow where you start, pause, and stop. So I created that prototype pretty quickly. There's a lot more I need to do, but going back to the topic of moving quickly, I definitely wish someone taught me how to move quickly. Two big benefits of this is that it'll help me not overthink. As someone who is really into the details of how things work, there's been many times where I'm just stuck on the details and I don't take a step back to look at the bigger picture of things. If there were issues in those small details that deviates me from the bigger picture and caused me to really lose focus on what we're trying to deliver. And the second thing is that moving fast helps me fail faster. And I really do wish someone taught me that it's okay to fail, as long as they do it really quickly. I think it's natural for us to not wanna fail. I definitely didn't wanna fail and disappoint other people because you lose that person's trust and expectations for you in the future. But in reality, I feel like it's all transient. It's kind of like recency bias, where you remember one thing for a little while because it's recent, but you're most likely going to forget all those mistakes and failures. And just thinking about it more, if someone fails nine times, but struck gold on the 10th time, I feel like they've earned much more of my respect compared to someone who only tried once or twice and just stopped trying at all. And I really do respect people who take more risk. I feel like that's pretty bold of them to do that and really taking a bet on themselves to see if something works out. But anyways, I have to get some more work done because it's still work day and I'll share more of my thoughts later in the video. Get that sandwich. I think one big benefit of moving quickly and releasing the app before the end of the year is to get user feedback. And I feel like that's as important as creating the app itself. I actually wonder what people would say once they start using the app. Because they're choosing to use it, I feel like that would give me really valuable insight on what they're thinking about when they're using it, as well as some features that they would want as well. That's something that I've been always struggling with, fighting against perfection because I do want to make things right and I want to do it the right way. But at the same time, if I try to be as perfect as I can, I'm probably not going to get anywhere. And so I think I really need to lean into being more scrappy and building more things just to build them without the thought of making things perfect. I think I really learned this lesson when I started making videos on YouTube. I remember the early videos that I've created where I obsessed about the camera angles, the editing, how it looks like, the colors and all that. But in reality, I feel like the content matters most in how it's delivered to the audience. I've made a bunch of videos and I learned the process and how to not overcomplicate things, whether it's color grading or editing. I've been getting my reps in filming these videos without trying to make a perfect plan. So moving and learning quickly has really benefited me in this way. And I think I really need to translate that to actually building my apps. But as I mentioned before, I still have a bunch more mock-ups I need to do just to get the main functionality working. Now I've got to wrap up work and then get on to the evening. The downside of working a desk job is that you're mainly inside. So I'm gonna go and get some exercise in. You ready? Okay. Hi, can you edit the model? So to be honest, it's been kind of tough to stay focused here in Las Vegas. Some more cares about what's around me because everything here is pretty new to me. I really do need to stay focused, work on my app because that's a pretty big deal. And like I mentioned before, I do want to get it out by the end of this year, which is coming up pretty soon. I found that a lot of the apps I downloaded and tested that are similar to the Focus Timer and Pomodoro use metrics in terms of displaying how long the users are focused for and when they decide to have their focus sessions and time blocks. That's something that I personally want to implement myself because it's kind of cool to see how long you're focused for over the course of a week or a month, as well as seeing which time slots in the day you're most productive in. And I also need to design that and prototype that on Figma to see how it looks like. I personally like the calendar look where you can see how much time you're invested between which hours of the day. So that's what I'm really leaning towards. We are gonna continue working on the prototypes and design because I'll be really leaning on that during development. But after I'm done designing and all that, I do need to break down the work that's needed so that each feature is more manageable and I can complete them and see the timeline on how long it will take. So yeah, there's a lot to do. Just trying to figure all of this out along the way, as well as just learning the new technologies that I'll be using. But stay tuned for more and I'll post more vlogs like this to give you guys an update on how the project is going and just whatever I'm doing throughout the day as a remote software engineer. So thanks for watching. I hope you learned something and I'll see you in the next video.