Starting a company when you have a family, part 2

It might sound strange but I didn’t create my company because I expected to make much money.  To make money you need to be able to dedicate a significant portion of your time to researching a potential product and developing a solution.  In working two jobs and starting a family time isn’t a readily available resource.  Instead I created the company as an organization to launch any home grown products under, use as a learning resource for future endeavors, and general legal protection should anything happen.

One of the hardest realities I’ve found is maintaining focus on a product and technology.  There are constantly ideas popping into my head on a new app or service that I could develop or framework I could use to make development quicker.  If you’ve done anything with JavaScript then you are all to familiar with this problem; a new day brings a new framework that makes all other frameworks inadequate.  Amazingly enough this is where have limitted time has really helped.

Instead of jumping into a new pool of ideas and technologies every month my limited time has forced me to focus on a small subset.  Now when I have an idea I jot it down and let it simmer for a few months or even years.  If the idea has real potential then I’ll revisit the idea and start to research it further.  If it doesn’t then it will eventually go the island of misfit ideas.  Technologies are handled the same way.

Because I started off developing for BlackBerry phones I had only a few options, HTML/JavaScript for BBOS and Playbook devices or Java for BBOS only.  Since I wanted the most visibility in the app store I went with HTML/JavaScript and developed a WebWorks application.  The first run at the app I wrote all of AJAX and DOM manipulation calls by hand in JavaScript, no frameworks were used.  I took this route so that I could get a better idea of how raw JavaScript worked and understand how much a framework really helped simplify coding.  For the next iteration I used the JQuery Framework and was amazed at how much code could get ripped out and replaced with cleaner looking JQuery.

I’m not going to say that I have since dedicated my life to JavaScript and rank myself as an elite JavaScript coder with my own framework on GitHub that is used by the latest startups because quite frankly that isn’t the case.  The biggest lesson I learned from that experience was that JavaScript was an imateur language that had a lot of growing up to do.  I continued to use it for various projects but never dove in head first into it.

Since that foray I’ve focused on C++ development for BlackBerry 10 devices and Java for Android.  Up until the middle of this month I’ve always carried around a BlackBerry Z10 so any development was geared around BlackBerry 10 platform.  But given the demise of their operating system I’ve changed focus and started diving into two pools.  Android Java development and Angular/Ionic cross-platform development.  I’ll go into those in a future post as I’m still working my way through two online courses that will hopefully get me back up to speed.