There's Nothing Like Shipping!

Some lessons I've learned from weekly comp #9 - The Editor:

It's impossible to know the real impact of our systems, but they can be way bigger than what we thought. Four real people used my editor to help with their grant proposals. One of them posted the reply of my editor into the oficial whatsapp help desk of the Call for Proposals. It flagged a mistake in their own documentation: The call contradicts itself about its own deadline: one annex says December 2026, the body says 31 June 2027 — a day that doesn't even exist. There are 200+ people in this whatsapp group and they were all benefited from this one little flag.

There's no way to build a great system if you don't ship it and make first contact with the users. I've shipped my Editor and every real grant proposal it analyzed became an improvement opportunity. Ship fast, learn and iterate. The learning layer needs to be baked into every system from the get go. Ask for feedback as soon as possible. One of them, recording his band's second album, sent back thirteen minutes of voice notes to me. He'd gone through the critique one finding at a time, and told me, kindly, that two things in my summary were broken. Both are fixed now.

Showing the system's shortcomings is not detrimental. It is an asset. Capturing the improvement history allows you and others to see patterns and use them to avoid the same mistakes on your next build. Fixing the mistakes and just deleting the old version so people think you got it right the first time is not useful to anyone. One of those mistakes I made was that my system classified if the flag was confirmed by the official documentation or it was based on past learning on how to write a good grant proposal. The problem was that I didn't explain to the user how to read and understand the classification. After the feedback all new critiques start with an explanation on how to read this document.

These competitions are a real way of improving your own systems of building and shipping. It forces you to face real challenges. Make sure you test them in real life!

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There's Nothing Like Shipping!