Today some memories of a videogame came back. It was “little king story” a wii game similar to pikmin with a king instead of Olimar and workers instead of pikmins. The classical music was memorable too, it matched the style of the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_King_Story

wii game

I haven’t played this game since 2011. I enjoyed think I finished it but I don’t remember that much. It worked well as a distraction, as entertainment while I was trying to start a web product.

It wasn’t a good time to start a company, neither inside nor outside. The job market wasn’t great back then. The career change I made towards NLP didn’t work that well for me. I moved too far from Madrid so I lost most of the people I had.

Despite all of that, my family offered some support to start to write some web services I had in mind for some time. The idea was to use what is currently pydsl and attach a repository of languages, DSLs and a way to connect them. A hybrid between a language workbench and yahoo pipes.

I had some months to see if it worked. I developed a few services, a website for it in php and that’s about it. I didn’t do basic market research nor found the people that would be able to help pushing it forward. I didn’t fully implement the pipes idea (I called them boards, but same thing) as it would have required a long time and frontend skills I did not have.

So after a few months, I gave up and released the source code and decided to go to London and try my luck.

Lessons

What did I get out of it? Well, some parser knowledge, improved my python and php a tiny bit more. Also to learn a few bits of the bureaucracy of starting a company in Spain.

More importantly, the failure of it was the big learning, although I didn’t notice until much later. With no market iteration and no people to support the actual work nor to collaborate, I had no chance. I didn’t have any measurement in place other than code and visits. It was just an idea and the hope that implementing the idea would be enough.

It was closer to a dissertation than a business idea. A mental experiment and little more.

I don’t know I have fully internalised that lesson yet. I still do hope that coming with an idea is the best part and I apply that to the way I write programs. I believe that getting the structure right is the most important part of the work, which is not a common belief. But some of it stayed with me and there is some structure to the way I think on projects that wasn’t there before.

In hindsight, this is a very expensive way to learn which I was privileged enough to experience.

The cycle repeats

I don’t think it is coincidence that Little King Story appeared in my mind. This moment resembles that one in many ways. A change of career path. An environment going downwards. The temptation of focusing on an idea as a form of getting out of it, without that much feedback.

Or simply getting distracted with a good game not to think about any of this.