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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I spent 9 years building domain expertise in a traditional engineering field and have many ideas …

I spent 9 years building domain expertise in a traditional engineering field and have many ideas for startups that would 100% be successful if I had the time/capital/grit/etc... not just me, anyone with my experience would be able to do it. It is incredible how absolutely awful most engineering software is. Meaning software for mechanical, civil, chemical engineers, etc... The business logic backends are basically all ancient codebases written in C++ or Fortran. CI/CD? Testing? Clean code? Yeah, no. You're having spaghetti code for dinner. And the greybeard who wrote that line of code 25 years ago and is still hanging out in a back office is reverting your changes if you touch "his" code. Imagine what someone could do using a language like Julia or Python/Numpy with modern software engineering practices could build. You would be able to iterate and add new features so quickly, none of the current players who all basically built their stuff in the 90s would be able to compete. I applied for a job at one of these companies and they earnestly asked me if I knew how to code in Delphi... …

Original discussionMy Fifth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder161 source comments · at import
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DA

People seem to do it. I'm sure it's a lot of hard work but there are concrete examples. Stripe, Blend off the top of my head.

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DA

Are you saying the software products used by (for example) chemical engineers are no good? What are they using the products for? On what dimensions could the products be made better? Ie, faster, easier to use? Something else?

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ML

What makes you think the folks developing CAD/CAE software are so behind (nay, negligent)? No amount of React will solve topology or perform naming and matching (look it up, modern CAD can’t live without it). A lack of respect for established success is both a superpower (don’t listen to the bozos) and foolishness. Knowing when to use each is what makes some pursuits blossom and others slowly burn out.

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