What am I'm doing

In Toastmasters, you’ll end up having to write a lot about yourself, this is meant to encourage introspection however it can get rather repetitive, especially when you try to do something that you specifically aren’t interested in which just makes the speech come out as soulless. in my search for something that I found interesting that isn’t doused in tech jargon, I thought I’d write a bit about something a three people have already expressed interest in: What I’m doing right now.

Who am I

For those of you who missed the intro, I’m Alexander Gullen, and up until april of last year I worked with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation doing data analysis, mostly with a tool called Power BI. Once I had sufficient experience with the tool, I found the option to create my own extension of this program which ended up getting 1,000+ downloads without any advertisement or promotion.

Fun fact: last time I checked the analytics, while there were 0 total downloads in Canada, there are 5 Downloads in Ukraine.

While I had big dreams for this project, the difference between dreaming them and seeing more than a thousand people use your “product” is indescribable. And the most important thing I learned from this is that it’s really not that hard to start. If you have something that people find value in, whether it’s writing, or a group, the biggest limitation will be your own headspace.

So what am I doing.

I’m building software and organizing software development. While working at the MTO I met a fellow intern who was very interested in what I was doing, so interested in fact, he asked if I was willing to take him on as a Co-founder.

This student’s skillset is the opposite of my own, he studied law and is exceptionally skilled at building and maintaining social connections, a skill that even today I have trouble with.

we started setting up a very small MSP until we had saved up enough capital to support the initial infrastructure costs - selling other people infrastructure to support my own, as it were -, then once we had enough that I felt comfortable shipping the app, and now that our primary focus is on pitching the product - his responsability - and building out the product’s features - my responsability -. So far we’ve seen some truely unbelivable momentum so far.

An organization is composed of individuals, and when you have a team of really competent people who compliment your skillset, it almost doesn`t matter what you are building.

Why am I doing this?

All this leads to the question, why? The answer is: All for learning. The brain learns by innovating, taking risks, and doing difficult things, while I understand that not everybody has the same risk tolerance in their lives as a 23 year old, me and my co-founder have that oppertunity now and so we want to take it and support the education of others, while learning building, and doing things that are admittedly very cool. With the backign of summer business programs and incubators we may also be getting some interns this summer to support the development of our platform which means we get to show them how to deploy production code, build in go lang, use proxies, compile javascript, setup DevOps processes, use coding Agents, manage the deranged beast known as the SDLC, and all the things that I have learned in the last 6 months.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from this is that the world is a chaotic place, in GO you send data as plain strings across the network because that’s how HTTP works, and eventually order is made from that chaos. This most important thing is that you are able to learn, grow and adapt to the things around you to make you more ready and prepared for whatever chaos comes your way.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I had to have three major takeaways from this speech it would be this: 1) Starting is the hardest part, and it’s not even that hard. 2) A good enough team will make anything possible. 3) The world is chaos, but you can make your own sphere or order.

And while I know this kind of content is pervasive on the internet, writing this helped me get a few important things into order, and I really do think it’s quite interesting how accessible stuff like this can be. Hope you enjoyed.