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An Iterative Approach to My Blog

Clarice Bouwer

Software Engineering Team Lead and Director of Cloudsure

Friday, 27 July 2018 · Estimated 1 minute read

I was leaving the corporate world behind and needed to rebrand. I had a hard deadline. I had a new job, a new domain and new hosting, I needed a new blog.

I could have rebranded my old blog but I didn't take that approach. In retrospect, it wouldn't have been a bad idea to have done that. Oh well.

I still love the idea of a database-free blog. All my content is kept in markdown files. I started using Gatsby instead of Jekyll. It's a site generator that uses React - so that I could learn React, at the worst possible time. 😂 The learning curve was a mountain.

That lead to some pressure. Features were missing; components didn't work, some were buggy; styling and usability needed tweaking. I put something together.

I PAUSED! If there is one thing I learned from corporate programmer is that it doesn't have to be perfect! It worked. It looked good. There was content. The core of the "product" was there and ready to be shipped. And so it launched.

As I keep writing, I keep fixing and tweaking small things. Disqus is now working, the dates should be less wonky, animated gifs have a loading, stop and start state. There are actually animated gifs. I am writing more technical articles that before (yup, I was scared to).

There's more I need to do. There will always be more. And that's what makes it exciting!

What on earth does this have to do with me? Probably nothing, unless you want it to mean something. 😉

In my opinion, perfection can result in a stagnated delivery process which could possibly render the product redundant when it ships to market too late.

We keep hearing about iterative this and iterative that so it's not a new concept to launch something and iteratively apply changes with a quick feedback loop from anyone using the product.

It's what I did, it worked and it's still working. The core is there. People can read the stuff I write. The rest of it is just attractive fluff.