Learning to Let Go of the "Perfect" Developer Workflow

I’ve been at my cleantech startup for just under a year now. Between university lectures and late-night coding sessions fuelled by coffee and energy drinks, I’ve learned more than any course ever taught me. Before jumping in, I pictured startup life as this mix of innovation, creativity, and maybe a bit optimistically, heaps of free time. Reality check: it’s actually a constant tug-of-war between shipping fast and building things that last.

At uni, everything is about clean, well-structured code. At a startup? There’s this urgency to just get something out the door. You focus on an MVP that solves the core problem, then you iterate based on what actual users tell you. It’s how you figure out if anyone even wants what you’re building, attract investors, and improve based on real feedback. But for someone who genuinely enjoys writing clean code, it can feel pretty uncomfortable.

Once the MVP is out there, the next question is always “will this hold up?” Can the codebase handle growth? What happens when user numbers start climbing? You need to think about scale early, or you end up with a product that falls over just when things start going well. But finding the time and resources for that kind of forward-thinking in a startup? That’s the hard part.

It’s easy to frame speed and scalability as opposites, but that’s not quite right. The real skill is knowing which parts of the project need to move fast and which ones need careful thought upfront. Getting that balance right is what separates startups that stick around from ones that don’t.

In startup land, everything is always shifting. Watching our more experienced engineers and leaders, the biggest lesson has been that adaptability beats perfection every time. It’s about rolling with feedback, picking up new tools, and staying ready to change direction when you need to.

Startup life has forced me to let go of the idea of a perfect developer workflow. It’s messy, it’s often a race against the clock, but it’s genuinely rewarding. If there’s one thing I’ve taken away, it’s that starting perfectly matters way less than adapting and keeping going.

To anyone else early in their career and diving into the startup world: it’s a wild ride. Balancing speed with scalability is the forever challenge of building software. It’s tough, but every bit of it is worth it.