The ignorance advantage

We often romanticize youth when it comes to startups and that can certainly be debated, but I want to talk about an aspect of youth that is not as obvious on the surface - ignorance.

With domain experience we learn to intuitively know what is worth our time and how to accomplish our jobs in a way that we know to be effective. Over the years we learn what doesn’t work and what is just a waste of time. Along with this many people end up in the cliché situation of “we have always done it this way” or “that will never work”.

But things change; technology changes; possibilities change and it becomes very easy for the experienced among us to not realize it.

My example

Coming from an electrical engineering perspective about 8 years ago I was not well engrossed in the history and standard techniques of software development. In my ignorance I began to believe that it would be possible to create a generalized solution to most crud apps and internal tools used in many businesses. I was told by those who had been around a lot longer and been traditionally taught that this was a foolish thought that had been attempted and failed many times before. So I began to work towards this goal building an application as a side project that I believed would solve this problem.

I then had an opportunity to work at a university that needed an internal portal developed - not quite what I was building and they had very specific backwards compatibility needs. I was given a one year contract to work on the problem - but I still wanted this general solution.

I began to merge some of the system I was building on the side into a customizable widget within this portal, and then moved more and more functionality to it until in the end I had what we called a microApp. The software began being internally adopted for new internal apps, then it began being used to port other applications into it because it was easier to maintain. In the end I was given permission to design from the ground up around the microApp system and my boss joined me.

We ended up with what would now be considered to be a low code development system that includes applications and workflows with built in version management, SSO, a secure data proxy, and much more that is used to build and manage the bulk of the IT infrastructure. The application was released by the university as an open source project https://github.com/EscherLabs/Graphene.

My current endeavor is derived from this effort to pull out the developers favorite feature (the microApp form builder) and flesh out the capabilities around that for other developers as a stand alone product.

The bottom line is that it would not exist if I had known that it was not possible. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that many of the scientific and mathematical breakthroughs seem to be made by those still early in their careers before they have solid beliefs. So I encourage you to keep your mind open as well and I certainly try to do so myself.