💾 Archived View for daniel.flounder.online › journal.gmi captured on 2024-09-28 at 23:41:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-08-31)
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24-09-27:
Struggling. Had to work long days every day because the project is so broken and we're doing a workshop on monday. Went to a meetup where everyone is trying to build streaming engines and a big conversation topic was how awful flink was to work with. At least I'm not alone there. Everything seems sort of working now but its really fragile and I hate it. I told my cofounder that I can't keep working like this and I plan to step down or leave the startup entirely. Being basically the only dev on this mountain of 80% implemented features is way too much to ask of someone, and we can't seem to find anyone to hire that can actually take it over any meaningful aspect of it.
24-09-20:
Having fights with my cofounder about this new guy we have helping with eng work for a few months, I'll call him M. So I wrote this proof of concept cloud service that deploys our software to the cloud and gives you an endpoint. M is asking me questions about the code and I'm trying to onboard him. My cofounder blew up at me after I suggested to him to get the code running first and then work from there. My cofounder has this big micromanaged list for him which includes a bunch of engineering tasks. I'm trying to emphasize that iterative development is important and to onboard him on to the existing code before he starts developing new features. This morning, M reached out to me because he was having trouble with this one part, which is just simple debugging of our software. My cofounder is basically in a panic about how that part is unnecessary that and it'd 'speed up development' to execute them as tests instead. Just let him get the code running. My cofounder said to me to stay out of it and to just work on the main codebase. I told him he can't muscle me out since I'm still a critical dependency and he responded with 'this type of language is hurting our relationship'. He is also accusing me of 'losing a week of engineering work' because I suggested that M get the code running first.
I have a final interview round with DataDog coming up soon.
24-09-17:
I had to fire our first employee and that was really hard for me. It's a loss like anything else and I felt a lot of grief from it. He's still around, maybe for the next month? Weird German laws around firing people. I repainted my living room to move it from dark blue to white and it feels so much better. Feels like fall all of a sudden.
24-09-08:
More reflections on the mushroom trip. I was sitting there looking at my walls and reflecting about how I wasn't getting any good visuals from them. The prior occupants painted the walls and ceiling in really dark colors, and it makes the room feel like cave. I generally ignore it, and during my trip I was aware how I don't place much thought in aesthetics. I thought about why. How much time do I actually spend in the 'present'? I think my head is usually in the short-term future. I tried to think about the future and it just gave me this huge sense of anxiety. So now I have this new intention to try to be more present, and I'm trying to figure out what that means for me. I am painting the walls of my apartment to improve the aesthetics, but I guess not for superficial reasons, but so I can feel more comfortable being present in my space. I think trying to be present would lead me to doing activities that I actually enjoy, rather doing things I don't enjoy because it achieves some future goal. I was talking to someone at the bar last night about Yoga, their deep meditative practices, and what it means for them to be present. It's just interesting to see how their form of being present is something they feel so deeply connected with and I don't feel that connection with what they were describing. Another part of my trip was about how deeply connected I feel with having new experiences that also have a strong emotional component. For me, I feel like it is more important than personal accomplishment or intellectual achievement, and unfortunately I spend most of my time working on those types of tasks. I'm not quite sure what to do with this information yet, but I also don't want to delay action because I might miss an opportunity to change my life for the better. Also, I don't know what I was saying in my last post, I guess I wasn't quite ready to share the stronger aspects of the trip.
24-09-06:
I unintentionally had a pretty strong mushroom trip the other day. I was weary going into it because I still have depression, but it's also why I wanted to do it. And I'm so glad I did it, I really needed that trip and I feel so much better now.
Some key trip takeaways:
- Acknowledging my depression in a really deep way, to the point where I now have a strong desire for change
- Had a really great bonding moment with the cat, while I stared into my misty weed closet listening to vibey music and had really strong visuals of smoke and colors and moving patterns
- I have a lot of anxiety thinking about the work I have to do with my startup, and I can manage it better
- It's really hot in my apartment with all the grow lights
- I've been performing poorly at work and it's making my stress so much worse. I have a new resolution to get things in order.
- Had a little freakout moment where it all got too intense, but friends helped. I was too fucked up to unlock my laptop and put on music so I just had to lay there for what seemed like forever. I gotta remember to have a little alcohol, a little anti-anxiety meds, and have a sitter lined up next time.
24-08-28:
My cofounder is trying to pitch investors and told me to review a 3 page pitch document. Out of all of it, he only describes the product in a single vague sentence. Rofl, gl.
24-08-27:
My cofounder is a CEO that rules by fear. Every time I'm in a meeting, he's grilling our employee about what hes being doing. He's abjectly terrified now. Every time he talks to me, its either passive aggressive 'oh you could do this in a day why should I try' or hes just being hard on himself. This is the second person, out of 2 people that we've brought on board, that hes completely demoralized to the point where they stop working completely. My cofounder even had the audacity to tell me a story where he went on a pod cast and when the question of 'the hardest thing of doing a startup' he said that 'some people are doers and some aren't and you can't tell the difference'. Come on dude, this guy just needs a tiny amount of reassurance and he would be fine. Publicly shaming him is a fucked up thing to do to a person. Also I'm interviewing with other places, I have yet to see a single percent of equity after 4 years of work so I'd be leaving that all behind but honestly fuck it. I should have quit outright years ago and I'm stupid for sticking it out as long as I have. The last worst part of my cofounder is that he thinks I need help figuring out how to 'parallelize' my work, and he thinks people are just extensions of himself and he gives work as such. I've never seen anywhere where that actually works but hes so convinced that if I don't do that then I'm not being a proper CTO.
I'm not going to bat enough for our employee. If my cofounder does this shit, I need to stop it so it doesn't destroy my engineering culture. I've been giving him the authority to do it and I shouldn't be.
24-08-21:
Ah I see why my cofounder is being so hard on me. He's ramping up to blame me for a feature that I 'didn't deliver' to our customer that was in the July 24th release that he didn't want to tell them because he didn't think it was 'tested enough'. Sorry bud.
He's also being mean to our employee by saying shit like 'Why wasn't this discovered sooner' for a bug that was found in a non-critical feature. I had to step in with process mumbojumbo so its not a fucking blame game shit. It's terrible.
24-08-20:
I missed a major deadline and our only customer got angry. Worked 18 hours yesterday to round out the issues, which are still unresolved. I was too tired today to do an interview with DataDog about a position they opened about a technology /I created/ when at my last employer. My cofounder then did this thing where he's like 'we're not getting along' and I'm like yeah our eng org doesn't pass the vibe check. He then got confused about what vibes were and I had to explain that vibes were real. THEN at the end of the day he asked me to deliver this thing I hacked together last sunday so he could reach out to their CEO and demo the compatibility with our product. Like damn, I should have went on that interview. It's when I start being productive again is when they know they can extract a lot of work out of me. I work with terrible people.