✴️ How I'm Making... #20

We have a lot of new readers this week! Welcome 🙂 What are you currently working on? For the regulars, I hope you’re having a productive weekend.

✏️ Summary

• It’s easy to get bogged down in the details

• Stand on the shoulders of giants

• But don’t forget to understand the basics

Have you ever tried making meringue with a fork?

When I was in college, I fancied myself a chef. I thought I’d impress my girlfriend at the time by making a baked Alaska. (It’s an ice cream cake with meringue on the outside that you blowtorch.)

I went out and shopped the ingredients, got everything I needed including a blowtorch. It was only when I got to the meringue part that I realized I didn’t have a whisk. I was probably the only home cook in the east coast that had a blowtorch but no whisk. So, I made do with the next best option, a fork. If you’ve never tried, whipping up egg whites into stiff white peaks takes bloody ages.

Did I make the right decision? By choosing to suffer through with a fork, I spent 15 minutes longer whisking. By choosing to spend $2 and 5 minutes to grab a whisk from the nearby CVS, I could have solved the problem forever.

As entrepreneurs, it can be attractive to suffer through undesirable situations. Indeed there are plenty of challenges that we have to face head on. But make sure you are spending your effort solving the real problem. There is no need to reinvent the wheel at every turn.

📈 Example of what not to do…

This week I spent hours trying to count syllables. I needed it so my app could grade the comprehension level of a piece of text. As it turns out, getting code to count syllables is difficult to get right.

For my first pass, I grouped vowels and consonants together, turning every word into either a [0,1,0,1,…] or [1,0,1,0,…]. Then I found out the letter ‘y’ sometimes acts like a vowel when surrounded by consonants…

After hours of digging I found myself in a deep hole, surrounded by a dizzying number of exceptions and special rules.

That’s when I turned to google. That’s when I found this packaged code:

So my logic went from this…

to this:

Don’t be like me. Spend a few more minutes to find the simple solutions that are staring you in the face.

CAVEAT: Don’t forget to understand the basics.

When I built my first app (a meeting booker), I coded everything from scratch. And I mean EVERYTHING. From the date indicator to buttons, calendars and more.

It meant that I progressed extremely slowly. It took over 4 months for me to start using imported package codes and APIs.

You might think that was 4 months wasted. I disagree. If I didn’t force myself to understand what every single line of code I used was actually doing, I would never be able to build what I’m building today.

The greats never skip the basics. That’s how they become the greats. When you choose to take a shortcut, make sure you understand everything that goes into that step. That’s how we become better at our crafts.

🔗 Progress Update

My goal with WordRobin is to make the writing AI that actually makes you a better writer. The first step to improvement is finding the problem.

This week I focused on the first step to this process: the grading function.

I added two ways to grade your writing. One for your whole document, and one for your selected text.

This is the first step to the diagnosis - many more to come!

 I also cleaned up the layout

When the goal is to enable clear thinking and writing, the user interface matters.

We are not going for overwhelming widgets and dashboards here. Just the clear analysis and delivery of information that directly helps you write better.

What’s Next?

The name of the game is improvement. I’ll be adding more analysis that helps users sniff out areas they can improve and edit. The most important next step is to build the ability to highlight certain parts of the text.

That’s all for now!

If you’re trying to climb

Ben | X