Innovation isn’t a straight line

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You may have heard this said before, but I feel this is one of those things that you don’t understand until you experience it firsthand.

At my previous job my team was tasked with creating a piece of software that would track a piece of equipment that another company had rented out to one of their customers. I was told that the equipment, once it was rented out, would never move again. The customer that it was rented to will change, but nothing else will change. The requirements were pretty simple, so I got to coding!

As Uncle Bob hilariously put: Code was pouring out of every orifice of my body.

Little did I know, the person who gave me those requirements was oh so wrong. We would get new requirements after new requirement, so much of the code had to be modified to fit these new vectors of change. ORM relationships that were thought to be static turned out to be dynamic in nature as time went on. More and more people had to get involved so I could get the full scope of what the hell I was trying to create here. It wasn’t until I got a hold of the salesman who kicked off this whole project that I was able to get a full picture of everything. Turns out, we track the equipment’s physical location, the customer that equipment is rented out to, AND we track which company actually OWNS the equipment. It wasn’t even guaranteed that we own the equipment!

But through iteration after iteration, things started to smooth out. Things started to change in ways that I expected. New requirements came in and I didn’t have to touch everything. Boundaries started to form and things started to get easier.

At some point, the salesman and I were discussing something over the phone and had said the phrase: “I can’t believe this was so hard. It’s like we’re inventing something from the ground up!”

I replied: “That’s exactly what we’re doing. This is what inventing feels like.”

I hope this story brought some amount of smile to your face 😌. I know I look back on this memory and laugh a bit.

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