Journal 004
The Software Was Never the Hard Part
I expected to spend most of my time writing code. Instead, I spent it learning how to ask better questions.
When I started building Wayli, I assumed software development would be the difficult part.
It wasn't.
Learning to think clearly turned out to be much harder.
What changed
The project has involved thousands of conversations.
Some ended with a new feature.
Many ended with nothing changing at all.
At first, that felt unproductive.
Why spend an hour discussing something if the code stayed exactly the same?
Over time, I realised those conversations were doing something far more valuable.
They were refining the question.
Often, by the time we understood the problem properly, the solution became surprisingly simple.
Sometimes we discovered there wasn't actually a problem to solve.
Other times, we realised we were trying to fix the wrong part of the system.
The software improved, but only because the thinking improved first.
Why it mattered
Wayli isn't built by collecting features.
It's built by collecting understanding.
That has changed the pace of the project.
We spend less time asking,
"What should we build next?"
and more time asking,
"What have we just learned?"
That simple change has influenced almost every decision we've made.
Features can always be added later.
Understanding is much harder to retrofit.
What I learned
Looking back, the best conversations rarely ended with better code.
They ended with a better question.
Once the question is right, the code usually follows.