If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!

― Benjamin Franklin

Recently I pitch my idea to one of my close friends about rimas.co, since the idea is still in infancy, I pitched him what I would like to the computer to do in probably the most optimistic way that I could of thought of. Since I started to work on this project, as a side project to learn machine learning it has not ben a main focus of mine, but instead just a fun project that I could work on when I had some free time to spend. Now that we are moving to 2015, I am thinking about what I would like to accomplish for 2015 and where and how I see my self spending that entire year. Rimas.co is going to definitely be one of my main projects that I will be working on.

The startup that fails to plan, is the one that planned to fail

After discussing the idea, I found out that their is a genuine need for this type of application, well that’s according to 20+ individuals that I have talked to about the idea on campus. But this does not necessarily mean that I should start hacking away and releasing as much code as possible to get the application completed, because for starters I don’t really know what I’m building. Sure I learned about recommending systems in the course and yes I implemented a couple of clustering algorithms. But how do I turn what I learned into a product? That’s the tricky part! Because we all know if you go ahead and work and write a couple of classes and get a large amount of the project completed in a short amount of period for example, you take 3 days to write 80% of the application but then you take 27 more days fixing what you did those first three days. Thats hell! Step away from your keyboard. Instead what I am doing is taking a couple of days to plan out what the system requirements are, user requirements and business requirements before writing any piece of code. Create concrete definition of classes that represent domain specific problems and only then can you have the right building blocks to start working on the application.

Avoid Gold Plating at all cost

In the first initial thoughts of the application I have hundreds of ideas of what I would like the application to do but that’s all they are ‘ideas’, so I have to decisively choose what will give me the most in return for the least amount of effort. This is why it’s just as important to know what NOT todo then what you actually end up doing.

Till next time

Rick H.

PS: Make sure you stay tuned for the release of the great plan that I am creating for rimas.co