My talk from React Summit is now online, if you're curious. It's about code rewrites in the context of hyper growth startups. The ultimate sin. Or is it 🤔
My thesis is that code rewrites enable fast growth. Here's the pitch:
If you don’t have time to build it right, when will you have time to build it twice?
In hyper growth startups the old adage breaks down. You get an expanding time horizon – IF you can get it shipped. An imperfect feature next week beats the perfect feature 2 months from now. Your code won’t matter if you’re dead.
I didn’t believe this until I saw it myself.
A startup on the cusp of hockeystick hired me to rewrite their jQuery app in React. Their tech proved the idea then became a burden.
Over the next year we rewrote the whole app from scratch, grew a team of React experts, created a codebase that’s a joy to work with, and got the company to a $100,000,000 Series B. All because the early engineers knew that if the crappy version works out, there’s going to be time and resources to fix it later.
This talk is about what I’ve learned while rewriting an app with users banging down the door.
The audience loved it, but I didn't. Plus I had a terrible hair day 🙈. What do you think?
Cheers,
~Swizec
Continue reading about You do have time to build it twice
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