QT: Speed Kills

Hey folks! This is Dave Albert for quick take.

On this quick, I want to talk to you about speed. As a startup, we’ve got a limited set of resources time, people, money. So you need to move fast. But I want to also say that you need to make sure to be cautious sometimes.

I recently tried to move too quickly by submitting or not submitting. But yeah so submitting a release build to Apple for iOS version. Our senior iOS developer was on holidays and the only people available to do code review were not as familiar with iOS as others and you know my time so split that I can’t consider myself an expert in iOS anymore. So a bug got through. Obviously everybody has bugs get through. But this was a bug that cause the session crashed for a small number of users. But still when you’ve got when in early stages, it feels terrible to give a bad experience to any of your users. So it wasn’t great. It was a simple fix. So basically I didn’t check for casting to an array to a certain type of array, a mutable array in the proper way and so for certain users, as I said it was a small number who had an element in their app. Lena tried to cast to a mutable array there was a crash, and so this was you know definitely a bad experience but we’ve got the fix out and it’s published and I really thankful that Apple expedited our review so we were ready within six hours to go live with the new version and once we had a fix in place.

So that was that was really nice. But yeah, I mean trying to move too fast, you can end up making mistakes which will then cost you time later as you go to fix them. There’s the saying, slow is fast and fast is slow and we lived this one.

It really stinks to have made what seemed like a relatively small change to fix some elements that could work better. Submit it seemed like everything was going well and then have crashes from production users because you were trying to move too fast. So just remember that just because you need to move fast. that doesn’t mean frantic.

I think we’re seeing the same thing with some of our communications within the team. So slack is great but if everybody is always being pinged by slack. Nobody takes the time to think through things sometimes. So a bit too much urgency can definitely be a negative thing. You know, we’re constantly working on our processes. And it was really nice that this was only affecting a small number of people and not all of our users. So just, it was a good a good time to have an arm under or not to be moving at a frantic pace move as quickly as you can safely, I guess would be safely is maybe not the right word, but I’m not sure what the word would be. But anyway, don’t move so fast that everything goes awry, or people are so busy responding to every notification that they can’t think deeply about the work that they should be doing.

You know, everybody wants to help everybody else. But if everybody jumps on every thing that pops into Slack, as soon as it pops into Slack, then you’ve got a bunch of people who are feeling extremely busy and are not accomplishing the things that you set out to do at the beginning of your your week, as per day, month. However, you function you know, we haven’t solved this yet, and it’s not broken, it’s just that it’s an area where I know we can improve.

So yeah hope that helps somebody out there move quickly but if you feel like you’re in panic mode that’s probably a sign that you’re going to end up making mistakes and causing more problems as new will solve by moving quickly. So hope that helps.

As always, if you have any questions, comments anything you can email me [email protected] or hit me up on Twitter @Dave_Albert later!

Until next time, remember any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic