apart from my job, i work on the side with my brother automating our parents’ business.
it started small. one app. then seven more over three years. each one chipping away at their daily grind.
working with them means spending time with them, which honestly dropped a lot after i finished school. this brought it back. alhamdulillah for this time together.
i thought i knew what their work was like. turns out i had no idea.
and with all the ai hype, people forget the value of just solid software. how can you be ready for ai when your systems still run on paper? you can’t skip the foundation.
looking under the hood shocked me. so much time wasted on stuff a simple script could handle. mindless tasks. manual fixes. humans doing robot work.
now that’s changing. reports run themselves. data stays fresh. work just vanished.
i figured this would mean rest for them. shorter days. that was my hope.
but nope. the freed-up time? they filled it immediately. more business moves. new ideas.
they didn’t slow down. they just stopped wasting energy on the boring parts and poured it into what actually grows things.
seeing that clicked something for me. that’s who they are. and honestly, i’m the same way.
we don’t build to escape work. we build so we can work on better problems.
shipping a bug in a side project is annoying. shipping a bug to your parents’ business costs them actual money. same family business. different lesson.
when we started, it was just about deploying. if it worked, good. deploy and move on.
but lately, i’ve been looking back at code from a year ago. and i hate it. who even wrote that?
turns out, it was me.
working on real stakes changes you. these aren’t toy projects anymore. a bug here hits my parents’ wallet. it stops a truck. it loses a miscounts payments.
that pressure forced us to learn.
we stopped guessing. talked architecture late at night. argued about data flow. owned our screw-ups.
no ci/cd at first meant every deploy was a heart attack. production was staging. rollbacks at 2am because of a typo. 💔
that chaos forced us to grow up. dev environments. automated testing. cleaner habits.
hating your old work isn’t failure. it’s proof of velocity.
if you don’t cringe when you look back, you aren’t moving fast enough.