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Seviipay is a SAAS startup I launched in Summer 2021. The idea was to bring best in class UI/UX to native cryptocurrency payments. Basically the stripe of cryptocurrency payments. The MVP worked on mobile and desktop just for Ethereum. I did a few product discovery calls without getting any buyers.. Eventually the project kind of stalled and I moved on to other projects. 

The big thing here was motivation. My motivation for leaving my job was not Seviipay. The idea for Seviipay just came up at a time when I was really motivated to get out. Handling burnout and starting a business at the same time is not a great idea. 

Another issue with Seviipay and solo-bootstrapping in general is that you need a lot of skills to get a functional business working. Sales, Accounting, product, UI/UX, marketing, etc. I did not have enough of those skills at the beginning of the project to make it work. There is a reason startups usually launch with a product founder and a sales founder. 

One other weakness of Seviipay or me I guess is that I do not have web design skills. And I have struggled to make Seviipay visually appealing. I am a written word guy so if I thought of a product that was cli only I would build it. 

My skill stack now has grown to range from backend development, javascript, content marketing, copywriting, and a bit of sales skills. But that still isn’t enough to make Seviipay work, I need strong web development skills and more sales power. 

What is next for Seviipay

Seviipay is on hiatus for now. I’ve gotten a new software job and am getting up to speed for that. Also working with some friends on helping start up an agency. The next thing I need to do is hire a web developer to help with the UI and team up with a sales person to get a real sales process going. 

I’m also going to look into how I can make Seviipay a real Web3 business. Right now its a cryptocurrency SAAS that relies on Web 2.0 to join the blockchain with the old school internet.

Fall into SledgeConf

November 5th 2021 4:30PM Pacific Time!

This quarter we have Jay Manning presenting on working with recruiters, negotiating offers and more!

I will also be presenting on Big Software and Big Tech!

This SledgeConf should be a bit more relaxed since we will only have 2 speakers.

https://sledgeconf.dev

I experienced a lot of burnout last year. Usually, I can just outlast burnout and it goes away when I start a new project. This time it lasted most of the year and I didn’t really get back to normal until 2021. In my case the reason my ‘burnout’ lasted so long and was hard to get rid of is because it was actually a health problem. I got into this industry because I love coding but I didn’t really feel that way last year and even considered leaving the industry. I had a lot of troubling focusing with the single minded obsession you need to beat down tricky bugs. At the time I thought I had burnout, I was depressed, it had to be something like that right? 

Well in this case it wasn’t burnout or depression, but my diet. I’ve had issues with various foods making me sick in the past, but never really isolated the cause beyond ‘don’t buy bread with preservatives in it’. I eat out a lot and while I’d thought about doing an exclusion diet several years ago, and have built apps in the past to help people isolate food ingredients they have issues with, I’d never actually done an exclusion diet myself. 

In the end I started an exclusion diet in January after moving into my new apartment here in Phoenix. The effects in my case have been totally worth it, as I now know which foods I can and cannot eat if I want to think clearly. I can’t really say I understand the medical causes behind things, but a number of foods give me a combination of brain fog, headaches and stomach discomfort. It isn’t life threatening beyond making me suicidal on occasion. But I really can’t afford to eat anything with Sage in it without ruining an entire day. 

So far I’ve had to exclude Sage, preserved meats, and wheat or gluten products. I can eat most other foods without a problem.  

Few of the software leviathans are built in functional languages. Facebook uses PHP/Hack, Google Java, C++, Amazon Java, Netflix Java. The common consensus about functional languages is that they provide large benefits over object oriented and procedural languages like Java. One particular claim is that functional languages like Haskell can do the same work in 1/10th the lines of code. If functional languages really are better we would expect to see the big tech companies investing heavily in adopting functional languages. We might even expect them to create a functional programming language just for their use case, but instead Google created Go possibly the least functional programming language created in the 21st century. What is going on here? Why aren’t functional programming languages being adopted in the biggest software systems on the planet? 

People have argued that inertia is the explanation for the low adoption of functional programming languages in massive software projects, but I think the evidence is in the opposite direction. Google created an entire new language that was intentionally less functional than Java. Facebook started on PHP and then extended that language into Hack. They could have used that energy to completely adopt Haskell. 

My suspicion is that the real reason functional languages are not used in massive software leviathans is meta-programming. Meta-programming enables software developers to create custom domain specific languages, literally adding new programming syntax and expressions to the code base. This is an incredible power and can make a lot of problems much easier. But meta-programming does not scale.  

In a software project with 10,000 software engineers. At this scale the limiting factor is not our ability to write clean and concise code. The main issue is understanding the effects of changes to the code base. A change might take a month to research before changing 500 lines of code. Not doing your research upfront more likely then not will result in you starting the project than realizing 2 weeks in that your approach will never work. Then having to start over. 

Meta-programming falls under the set of programming constructs that are easier to write than they are to read. This is true for all code of course, but in large code bases reading Golang code is reliably easier than reading Lisp code. 

In a algorithmic metaphor, Golang code complexity scales at O(n^2) vs Lisp code scaling at O(n^3).