It’s not just about the code: a lesson in product vision from DubHacks 2020.
The funny thing is, when I was choosing my major, my father told me studying vanilla computer science would be insufficient in the long run for my career. It’s not just about the ability to solve a problem, or randomly blowing out techniques and technologies when solving humankind’s problems; he apprised me to have a vision about what problems that I wanted to solve, how to solve them, and most importantly, how and whom it would help. God, I should have heeded my father’s advice even during a hackathon.
Anyway, as I say this after I was destroyed by my algorithms and systems midterms, at 03:00, I will tell you something. We learned that lesson, that merely thinking and churning solutions alone, unfortunately, would be useless unless our solution had direction, or drive, or a succinct goal.
Now, why is this the case? Here is some context; for the first time, the organizers of DubHacks were able to provide us with feedback related to our projects. Here’s an excerpt from it (the most important one, that is).
See that? Our description of our post, our marketing, our explanations, our ideas, our roadmap; none of this existed! It was partially my fault for not waking up in time in order to finish it (I really wanted to sleep after a week of slaving late nights from exams and responsbilities), but think about it. How would the idea for a yoga application that just shows you a fancy coloured stick mean to a bunch of people unless you contextualize the information, the process and the idea that it can help so many people who probably wouldn’t occur to use it for the entirety of their lives? It makes sense, now it does; why vision and a scope for your idea and your implementation is as essential as the functionality that your implementation has.
Humans are nothing but creatures of communication; for language is the ultimate form of communication. We thrive when we are able to bounce ideas off of one another, create a genesis of concepts from derivative notions, we communicate through the facilitation of information across many media! If we don’t communicate our goals, if we don’t streamline a huge application’s potential to solve problems, or give people a new reason to try something new, it won’t succeed because both us the creators and them, the users, would just be completely baffled at how to approach it. So we, the designers and the coders and the managers and the people who make stuff, we need to do the contextualizing, so that everyone who wants to use it will know how to use it, and then we also know how to add what features that will create a wonderful experience. It’s a push and a pull, its a yin and a yang.
Our degrees may teach us how to solve problems in a myriad of ways, but I realized one more thing: the best way for us to use our skills to solve problems, is to design products, services and goods that can solve a problem or make something better! It’s not just about proving that a graph can be disconnected at a point, or giving people a bunch of webcam sites for people on a React app, it’s about taking something that people don’t have, or don’t understand, and then putting it to context. If people understand how to use it in a defined manner, it will work wonders.
Anyways, here is this post’s associated banger; and it’s been twelve whole years since this song came out. I am officially old, that when I sing this in another decade’s time, my kids will genuinely find my taste in music old and (hopefully not,) appalling. This song is literally older than the entire generation of Fortnite players. But who cares, this shit will always remain in my heart as one of the 2000s’ most quintessential songs, and one of my very first that I could sing from top to toe.
