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18 Comments

Why is developing so complicated?

Hey Everyone! I'm building an ai desktop voice assistant and I have one developer and one ai expert but the project is taking too much time and it's not going as expected. While on the other hand the marketing and other stuff is going smoothly. I don't get it what to do. I'm getting so frustrated by this.

  1. 3

    I'm a marketer who used to work in marketing and operations for a startup.
    From my experience, you must first work out the product roadmap with the developers, which is very important for an internet product in its early stage. It is a project progress timeline, and you are a project manager to accept different key points. This will ensure that your project is in a steady state of progress.
    It is very easy to fall into the vortex of over-pursuing the details of the product in the early stage of the startup, and I think this is something you need to pay attention to.
    I hope this helps you.

  2. 2

    Hey, I'm not sure what I'm going to share is going to be helpful to you in someway or not but that's what I think.

    Usually when something takes too long to be executed, it's problem about lack of knowledge or experience, or in some cases, both of them.
    The fact that you have worked with the people in your team in previous project and that was successful might not be true in this or future project, because everyone has a different field of specialty.

    As a software engineer, I can say that while we are going to build a project or a product, we need to have a specifications and requirements and these two are different things.
    Just double check and make sure you have the specification and requirements. Usually we call it SRS, software requirement specification.
    Without this things might work, but with this things will work for sure.

    One other thing that I can say, is that breakdown project into a small piece of epics or let's say feature map, like you have a one final product with features and let's break it down into 15 different sections and for example, the first section will be let's build the court structure and the next section will be OK for example. Let's input the first main functionality something like this.

    I hope it helps,
    @Ethyaan on telegram

  3. 1

    What's the issue to be honest, development can be complicated sometimes, last year I built alot of Chrome extensions, but when I tried working on a LinkedIn Sales Nav extension my brain gave out. The sheer amount of effort to get Vite running with vue made me sign-out mentally.

  4. 1

    The problem is that your heart may not be into it, just like you put up this post without making any effort in providing context or details. These low effort efforts won't get you anywhere. It's reads almost the same as "oh my food is not tasty what should I do"

  5. 1

    what time scale did you expect? And what is the ful complexity needed for product mvp

  6. 1

    Hey @walking_Alive

    Did you validate your project first? Do you have users lined up? Are they willing to pay?

    Good development is difficult. The best advice I can give is to prioritize your known features by complexity vs impact. Start rolling out the features that have low complexity + high impact. Start small, and iterate.

    1. 2

      So instead of making complete app now I'm making a chrome extension first

  7. 1

    AI projects can be a little slow if you're used to normal CRUD applications. Be sure you have developers estimate the LOE for different milestones in 1 week chunks too.

  8. 1

    Depends on a person's context. Marketing experts say coding is hard, on the other hand, devs seamlessly solo code projects, but struggle the most with promoting it due to bad marketing skills and end up with 0 users :]

    The best choice would to find a balance or a friend that could help you with coding more advanced stuff. For sure do not get frustrated, give yourself some time, rest and build when you feel happy about it.

    1. 1

      Yah! I've figured out to break things in parts and do one thing at a time but for me I think the developer I currently have is a full stack developer and I'm building a desktop app which also involves ai so I think i need to find someone who has expertise in building just apps and have knowledge of ai. That can help alot

      1. 1

        Good developers regularly learn new skills quickly.

        If you have a good relationship with the developer, ie they communicate well and you trust them, keep them and agree with them on a timescale for them to learn the skills they need to learn.

        On the other hand, if you feel the developer is pretending to have skills they don't have, or is very bad at communication and progress updates, then look for another developer.

        I've been a developer for 13 years. The biggest hurdle in any tech-centric project is good communication between product side and developers. Sometimes, developers focus on details they don't need to (ie "premature optimisation") because they don't understand which stage the product is at. You don't code the same way if you work at Google where all your features/products will be scrutinised by many users, and if you work at a start up trying to validate a market - I've worked at both, completely different ways of working.

        So, really, whether you look for someone else depends on the quality of communication you have with a developer. Typically, developers can learn new technical skills more quickly than they learn new communication skills, because as developers, we expect to learn new tech skills on a regular basis (tech changes so fast). As a non tech person, it's best to work with a developer with great com skills, even if they need to learn new tech skills, because you really depend on your developer to implement the product, so you need to be able to trust them.

  9. 1

    Hi walking_Alive. Yes, development is truely taking too much time. Sometime, we i noticed that developers are too lazy and some developers are not expert. I also facing problems for my website development and modification.

  10. 1

    You may need to buy more and build less. What takes a lot of time to build takes even longer to debug, enhance and maintain. If buying isn't an option due to cost, maybe indie hacking isn't the right approach for this project?

  11. 1

    Well, if the problem you are trying to solve doesn't have a widely known and available technical solution, is completely logical that development is the hardest part.

    Combine that with having people that work part time and you'll have delays, especially if you don't have any kind of structured planning.

    Another important thing to note is that, if you are doing this full time, it's completely expected that you finish your work faster than they are finishing theirs

  12. 1

    Maybe -you probably need more structure. Break down the requirements into small tickets, put this in Trello, Jira or whatever project management software you prefer.

    Then, you can start to understand what the blockers are and what is taking more time than it should. You may need more developers or need to agree on certain milestones at certain dates.

  13. 1

    I have one developer and one ai expert but the project is taking too much time and it's not going as expected.

    Contractors or full-time employees? Devil's in the details:

    • What level of experience are they?
    • How much are you paying them?
    • Do you have enough understanding of code to be able to assess the talent level of a software engineer?
    • etc.
    1. 1

      They're not full time. We all have worked previously in other projects so we know each other and they are working on this project part time.

      1. 1

        @walking_Alive Are you open to working with an app development agency?

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