Day Three

A few days ago I left my day job to take a serious stab at a startup with Patrick Joyce.

Day one: Patrick helped me get up-to-speed on Mac OS X; we defined our tasks for the week; we looked at the problem domain and designed the core of our web app; and we set up our Rails development instance.

Day two: we developed with Patrick in the driver’s seat and me in the passenger’s. I played back-seat-driver by helping to make design decisions, catching typos and logic bugs, and learning from the driver.

Day three: we developed with me in the driver’s seat and Patrick in the passenger’s. Patrick played back-seat-driver.

Affirmations

1. Having two, complementary co-founders makes for good, quick, and concrete decisions. Good, quick, and concrete decisions lead to appropriate and quick actions.
2. Mac OS X, Rails, and TextMate make web development super-efficient.
3. Pair programming results in the development of correct, readable, and maintainable code.
4. Working a reasonable amount of hours, remembering to eat healthy food, and sleeping well keeps you sharp.