“Before you can build one good app, you have to build 100 bad apps.”
I don’t know who said it. Or even if that was the actual quote, but it was what stuck with me. It was years ago, and I believe I heard it from one of the guests on the Software Engineering Daily Podcast. I just know that quote, more than anything else, stuck with me.
It was right around the time I had gotten hung up on the idea of expertise through repetition – even if, or especially if, it includes failure.
“You just need to do more sets. I mean, you need to do at least six or seven sets a week MINIMUM.” That was the advice of T.J. Miller (playing himself) to Pete Holmes character on the TV show Crashing (S1 E2: The Road), right after Pete bombed on stage.
This idea that we need to get the reps in and embrace failure fast so that we can learn and grow and do better is a cornerstone of modern software development and personal improvement.
So, this blog is my record of me building 100 “bad” applications. In the beginning, some will surely measure up to that low standard. As time goes on, I’m hoping they will be less bad over time.
Applications in this sense might mean a web page, or a web site, or a mobile app, or an API, or really anything that could be considered coding or software.
And the apps might be built using both code and no-code solutions. The idea is to learn, to find out what works, to improve and to move on the next one.
Let’s go.
*If you know who said the quote first uttered on the Software Engineering Podcast, please let me know so I can properly credit them.