I'm making a serious product?
Virgin experience
If you read my post, Learning Idea #1: Help junior engineers learn programming, you know that my friend and I are rethinking how to create a better learning experience for junior engineers. Today, I present to him my research (aka my post), and we are turning it into a product together!
Well, to be honest, I have no idea what turning into a product means, but he seems to be chill about my research results and wants me to turn the research idea into a core feature that we are going to build for our MVP 0. Do you know how serious he is? He also asked me to do product design ideation, set a goal for interviewing our first user in two weeks, and launch an MVP on Twitter for 4 weeks.
Hmm…to be super honest, I have no idea why he wants to do this with me. I have no experience and no engineering skills to do anything.
Maybe that’s just San Francisco? Maybe he wants free labor, but I’m super happy to work on it for my free education. Look, someone can start teaching me how to build a learning product from scratch, advise me on my programming skills, and think about how to learn programming better together. How cool is that! Even if we just build together for a few weeks, I will be so happy with it anyway.
My friend told me he was interested in turning this into a business if possible because he really wanted to help junior engineers learn. I don’t know him that much, but I don’t think he is lying because he loves to explain things like a nagging professor. Whenever I asked him a coding question, he would discuss it with me for two hours, and I’m so happy to have this free tutor.
Anyway, I feel super happy about this because I was very lost for the past few months, and now I found something I feel like on the right path. I don’t know how it will go and feel a bit scared, but I’m intrigued to see how this project unfolds.
One thing I learn
One thing that I learned is that I need to ramp up my technical ability. I realize that I’m really really good at thinking about this problem (well because it’s my own problem), but I am reluctant to brainstorm solutions. I don’t think freely about solutions because I tell myself, “This is gonna be difficult to do it” in my mind. As I am on the journey to try to build more solutions, I would love to push my solution imagination to the next level.