Sprint 🏃‍♂️‍➡️

Had a demo with a large org today.

It all began with an initial call a few weeks ago with one of the team members from this org. We tried to show everything we had built. We discovered that querying large datasets in natural language is a use case that this team is interested in. Fortunately, we had started building something along these lines just a few days ago. We showcased whatever little we had built so far. It turned out that this was good enough to get us the demo with the larger team.

For the demo, we had to build a system that could read data from a database and answer user queries. I chose to also include features like deep thinking, and charts. It was challenging but it felt doable. Without this there won’t be an “aha!” moment in the demo. We had 9 days to build out the entire thing.

Given the scope of the task at hand, everything else had to pause. It was a short burst of intense focus. For the first time in my career, the word sprint made sense. This is what a sprint was supposed to be. Our product grew so much in the last ten days, it is almost unbelievable.

The demo went well. The audience was engaged. And the overall feeling was quite positive. But we don’t know the outcome yet. It will be sometime before we know it. 

As it happens at the end of a real sprint, I was left panting and struggling for breath after the demo. It was time to let go of all the stress that had built up. I pinged my co-founder, “Bhai break le raha mai ab. Aaj toh kuch nahi ho raha kaam… Feeling completely drained out ab…” . 

I feel grateful that I get to do this for a living. Solving real problems using software is a dream come true. In the last few days, I tried many new things - one of them was vibe coding. Struggled a lot. But stuck through it. At the same time, I also had to fall back to the time tested methods and common sense approaches to some of the problems. More on that soon.