First Use First

I was building a platform for a friend for a bootcamp, and it pulled me back to how we used to work. Back in the day we made a lot of platforms for reusability, for some future usage, or for another use case on a completely different project. That was the instinct, build it generic, build it once, reuse it forever.

But I keep feeling that if we go deeper, we should personalize the project for its main purpose first. Say we have to run a webinar, and we are making a quiz platform for it. The right move is to streamline that one webinar experience first. After that, sure, we can reuse it for another webinar, or turn it into a video course platform, or whatever comes next. The reuse is fine. It just comes second.

So we should care about the first usage first. I think we generalize things too early, and that is exactly where the technical debt creeps in. You build for a use case that does not exist yet, and you pay for it on the one that actually does.

Here is the part that changed my thinking. With AI, the code writing part is no longer the concern. So the real case is the personalized, product-wise experience, and that is where the care should go now. I am not sure what people will critique about this, but I am going with it, and I will rewrite things again and again if something feels off. Right now it all feels good to me, and enhancing the product experience is a solid way to work.

I am still holding my job, and I was never really into one specific role, not pure UX, not pure front-end, not any single name. I was doing everything, and I can carry the majority of the project work on my own. The only real concern is time. So I would rather bet on the product engineering experience than stick to one name or one domain. I am betting on the product, not the label.