Escaping Mr. 20% and losing the ego

This is a fairly long response to a comment on HN.

I've written many lines of code and thought many ideas in my life, but I have not shipped nearly as many. Why? I love coding for coding's sake more than shipping. Shipping requires product development, non-longbeard design, marketing, sales, and more important: customers.

Except for the game engine, everything I did was the special 20%. All the 20% projects were just a neat little idea implemented as if the core tech behind a masters thesis or a senior thesis. However, they didn't have the polish to become a product, and I get easily distracted by more difficult and more sexy ideas. At best, most of them make me look like Captain Hindsight.

I'm perfect for academics, but I found myself being too impractical for my students. This was one of reasons I dropped out of graduate school as I had become an irrelevant preacher. I did not practice what they were going to do, so how could I teach them? It felt dirty teaching them fairly useless things. I was working with tools (such as OCaml and LISP) that enabled me to program better, but programming better doesn't mean shipping better. Most programmers just need to learn how to solve basic problems and have the discipline needed to ship products; telling them that they can avoid memory leaks by using OCaml is like telling them to learn french to avoid pissing off Mexican drug lords. Instead, they just need to get in the discipline of being careful with alloc and free. Any aspect of a technical decision could be looked at as either a technological or a management+discipline issue.

So, looking back on the pile of code I've written. They are all shit because they didn't ship. Shitty code that ships is better than perfect code that doesn't. This is one of the lessons in life that make people like me depressed, but I've gotten over that. I've helped shipped three products and working on two more. One of them is my November start-up sprint (which I'm doing OK on, but I could be doing better).

Problematically, building many 20% things builds an ego. Ego is fascinating. On one hand, you need Ego (or to utilize a customer's ego) to sell a product. On the other hand, you need to lose your ego to build, ship, and support a product. This is why you need to have someone else to do your sales for you. When you get some one to sell you, then you don't need ego anymore. You just have a bunch of work to do.