Building Software is like Building a House

Common startup-mentality is to move fast and break things. Books like Lean Startup also posits that startups should build "MVPs", which is an incomplete version of the product that allows you to test it on real users so that you can iterate on it.

All the talk is about being cheap and fast, which I also think is important for a startup. However, I think people get it wrong as well, because while it is good to be lean, the product should not be buggy, wasteful or low quality.

I think of software as similar to building a house. The fastest way to get a house up is building a house with poor foundations, using the cheapest brick with prebuilt modules but it is not necessarily so that anyone would want to live in such a house. Instead, invest in quality but build only a small section at the time; I believe the end result will be better and you will receive better feedback that way. So when coding let's make sure that the code is good, let's not neglect testing, but with a limited scope. Let's take the time to think about the visuals and the energy efficiency of the solution, because neglecting this affects the quality of the entire product, and energy efficiency is a social responsibility we all bear.

I also think of writing code akin to maintaining a house. If your code is bad and smelly, it is like working in a kitchen that has not been cleaned for months with dirty dishes in a sink. It is not a place where you want to work in, or inhabit.

- Marc