Alright, let me tell you about this thing we called the “dim sum brothers” phase. It wasn’t really about the food, though we sure ate a lot of siu mai back then. It was about trying to get something off the ground, me and a couple of guys I trusted like family.
So, picture this. We’d meet up almost every week, usually at this noisy dim sum place downtown. Not for fancy talks, just real work, spreading papers out between the bamboo steamers. We kicked things off because we saw a gap, something nobody else was doing quite right, we thought. Seemed simple enough on paper, like most things do at the start.
Getting Started
First thing, we had to figure out the core idea. We spent maybe three or four dim sum sessions just arguing, sketching on napkins, trying to nail down what exactly we were building. Lots of “what ifs” and “how abouts”. Used a beat-up laptop to draft the initial plans right there at the table. Then came the dividing up of tasks. I took on the main build part, figuring out the nuts and bolts. Dave handled the look and feel, making it not look like something from the stone age. And Ken, he was supposed to be the money guy, finding people who might actually give us cash for this.
The Grind
Then the real work began. Forget the weekly dim sum, it became daily calls, late nights. I remember setting up a small server in my own basement because we couldn’t afford proper hosting yet. Just getting the basic framework up and running took weeks longer than I thought. Lots of trial and error. You’d fix one thing, two other things would break. Classic stuff.
- Wrestling with code that just wouldn’t cooperate.
- Trying to make Dave’s fancy designs actually work on different screens.
- Ken coming back empty-handed from meetings, folks just weren’t biting.
We kept pushing though. Fueled by cheap coffee and takeout, mostly. We’d still try to hit the dim sum place maybe once a month, sort of a progress check and a reminder of why we started. But the mood was different, more stressed. You could feel the pressure building up.
What Happened?
Well, long story short, it didn’t explode like we dreamed. We got a working prototype, something we could actually show people. It looked okay, it did the main thing we wanted it to do. But that momentum we had at the start? It faded. Ken couldn’t secure the funding we needed to really scale it. Dave got a tempting job offer somewhere else. And me? I was just burned out, man. Pouring everything into it for months, seeing it just sort of stall.
We didn’t have some big blow-up fight or anything. It was more like a slow fizzle. We had one last dim sum. Talked it over. We were proud of what we built, learned a ton. But we knew it wasn’t going further, not like this. We decided to shelve it. Still got the code somewhere on an old hard drive.
So yeah, the “dim sum brothers”. Started with big ideas over har gow, ended with a quiet understanding over tea. It’s funny, I don’t really regret trying. You learn more from the things that don’t quite work out sometimes. We’re still mates, still grab food sometimes. Just maybe not dim sum, brings back too many memories of server crashes and funding pitches.