Biggest learnings

Shipping something end-to-end changes you.

I used to think design was the hard part. Now I know it’s actually the fun part. No wonder companies deprioritize it. It’s such a small slice of the whole process, and honestly the easiest.

I imagine companies also deprioritize design because many designers are insufferable. They are convinced their work is the center of the universe, completely oblivious to the brutal complexity of everything else that has to happen. They complain endlessly about stakeholders and constraints while having zero understanding of what engineers and PMs are actually up against.

The App Store submission process is absurdly bureaucratic. Every hoop makes you wonder: how does anything get published?

But engineers—engineers have my deepest respect. Their entire day is an exercise in things not working. They write a solution that should work. It doesn’t. They fix it. It breaks differently. Some absurd edge case emerges. They fix that. Repeat. Forever.

Their salary isn’t just payment for work done. It’s truly is “compensation” for the daily pain they endure of nothing ever working.