justin

What good is experience?

When I didn’t have any experience, I thought that experience was totally worthless. Emmett and I taught ourselves how to build web applications in a few months in college and built the first version of Kiko pretty quickly. I did the front end by piecing together javascript tutorials until we had something that resembled a calendar.

We thought we were pretty awesome. If we could build a web app that easily and drum up a bunch of public interest, then it seemed to us that everyone should be starting startups right out of college, and that anyone who wasn’t was just too scared. What was the point of waiting? You aren’t getting any younger.

When I think about that first codebase today I want to vomit in my own mouth. I am glad that I no longer have access because I want to deny it ever existed. It was a mess of spaghetti code, and even though we built it quickly, it took a lot longer than it should have.

Ironically, now that I have experience, I think experience is priceless. What’s made me change my mind?

• Experience makes you move more quickly. It turns out I’m still not a wonderful programmer. I am, however, a pretty decent web developer, and this is entirely due to experience. Need a Rails CRUD app with an API? Boom, I’ve been doing that for 7 years now. I built the entire backend, frontend and API for Exec myself in three weeks in January.
• Experience helps you focus on the right things. When you don’t know what’s important it is easy to think every decision is important. Most of them aren’t. Having experience helps you know what decisions you can ignore, postpone or delegate (almost all of them), and what things you actually need to do right now.
• Experience gives you confidence. We’ve raised venture money for our companies before, I know I can do it again. I’ve built web apps before, I know I don’t need to hire a programmer to replace myself unless we find someone who is really excellent; in the meantime, I can wait. When you’ve done something before, you aren’t worried you can’t do it again.

I still think there are some potential downsides to having experience that are worth watching out for:

• Experience tends to pre-empt innovation. It’s been said before, but when you have a lot of experience in a certain area, you generally think of solutions and approaches that have worked for you in the past. Sometimes this prevents you from taking a fresh approach which ultimately would work out better.
• Experience takes time to get. Waiting for experience is also an excuse not to get started. By the time you feel comfortable and confident enough to jump off, the moment might have passed.
• You know some things to be impossible. Most things that were impossible or impractical years ago became possible or will become possible some time later. Your experience might tell you that something you want to do can’t be done. Other people will go on to do them.

And lastly, something I’ve been wondering: is it possible to fake experience by getting advice? Perhaps for highly specialized topics, like how to scale your exploding website. However, I think that there are a great many things that people are destined to learn themselves the hard way. So, don’t worry too much about trying to find a hack to get experience, when you get enough experience you’ll be experienced enough to know one doesn’t exist.

The power of vocabulary

I learned that the process of new words entering common vocabulary is called “lexicalization” today.

When designing a new program, you are forced to come up with names for everything on the backend. Those names then tend to bleed into to common usage among the team, even though there might not be any particular reason to be consistent. For example, at Justin.tv, since we designed the system around streams of live video, we ended up with Users and Channels. When we started saving video for playback later, we naturally called these videos Archives. Now, when we talk about video, we talk about archived vs live, all because of the names we picked to describe objects in the database six years ago.

In a startup, many things are changing all the time. You are constantly adding new objects to the system or are forced to come up with new processes for new situations. These new objects and processes all need names so you can communicate around them with the team. At Exec, we say an Exec is “on deck” if they are the next up for a job. If we need more Execs on the system at the moment, we say we need to “scramble up some people” or “get some people decked up.”

Not all new language is functional. Some idioms enter the vocabulary by chance. At Exec we say “that’s how you get ants!” whenever anyone leaves food out because we love Archer. We say we’ve got “jobs on jobs on jobs” when a lot of job requests come in, from the phrase stacks on stacks on stacks.

I like creating new words and phrases. I have an obsessive personality and often times will start saying a phrase over and over until people around me start adopting it. Lately, my go-to has been: “Boom! It’s that simple” (used to describe Exec).

I think having a unique vocabulary has a positive effect towards group cohesiveness. The words you use affect the way you tend to frame your thoughts – everyone using the same words can create a foundation for everyone being on the same page.