Right, so you think building a little something like a website for a local joint, say, the “mrb restaurant,” is gonna be a walk in the park. I mean, what’s so hard? A menu, some pictures, maybe a contact form. Easy peasy, right? That’s what I thought, or at least, what I let myself believe at the start.
Getting Started with Mr. B’s
So, Mr. B, the owner, he comes to me, all smiles. “Just need something simple,” he says. “So people can see my food.” Famous last words. I figured, okay, I’ll spin up a quick site. I even had this idea of using some new, flashy framework everyone was talking about. Supposed to make things super fast. So I dove right in. Got the basic pages up, menu looked decent. I was feeling pretty good, patting myself on the back.
Then the “little extras” started. “Could we add online ordering?” Mr. B asks one sunny afternoon. “Sure,” I said, thinking, how hard can it be? Then it was, “And reservations? Integrated with my phone?” And then, “What about delivery tracking? My nephew said it’s a must-have.” Each “little extra” was like adding another room to a house that wasn’t designed for it. The “flashy framework” I picked? Turns out, it was great for simple brochure sites, but bolting on e-commerce, real-time reservations, and GPS tracking was like trying to teach a goldfish to climb a tree.
The Downward Spiral
I spent weeks, no, months, wrestling with it. Trying to integrate payment gateways that didn’t want to talk to my setup. Fighting with plugins that promised the world but delivered a buggy mess. The code started looking like spaghetti. One fix here would break three things over there. My “simple” project for mrb restaurant was becoming a monster. It sort of worked, you know, if you squinted and clicked in the right order. But robust? Ha!
Why am I telling you all this? Because this wasn’t the first time I’d seen a “simple” thing turn into a beast. It reminded me so much of this other gig I had, years ago. This was way back, I was younger, more naive. A startup, full of big dreams and no cash, wanted an “all-in-one social platform for pet lovers.” Sounded fun. They had this charismatic CEO who could sell ice to an Eskimo. He painted this grand vision. I was the only tech guy initially.
I started building it. Piece by piece. Profile pages, photo sharing, a forum. Then came the “killer features.” “We need real-time chat!” “And a lost-and-found pet map!” “And a pet dating service!” Yes, you heard that right. Pet dating. Every week, a new brainstorm, a new “essential” feature. I was working 16-hour days. Eating takeout over my keyboard, sleeping in fits and starts. My social life? Zero. My health? Let’s just say my doctor started recognizing me on sight.
The platform became this huge, unwieldy thing. Nothing worked perfectly. The chat was laggy, the map crashed on older phones, and the pet dating… well, the less said, the better. The CEO kept promising investors the moon, based on features that were barely held together with digital duct tape. Eventually, the funding dried up. The whole thing collapsed. I was burnt out, bitter, and hadn’t been paid for the last two months. They just vanished. Poof. Sent me an email saying, “Thanks for your efforts, company’s closing.” That was it. I remember just sitting there, staring at the screen, thinking all those sleepless nights were for nothing. It took me a long time to recover from that, not just financially, but mentally. I almost quit tech altogether.
Back to Mr. B’s Place
So, when mrb restaurant started to go down that same path, all those old alarm bells started ringing in my head. I recognized the signs. The constant scope creep. The “it’s just one more small thing” requests. The feeling of drowning in complexity that I myself had helped create by saying “yes” too many times without pushing back or re-evaluating the whole approach.
This time, I didn’t let it completely crash and burn. I had a very frank conversation with Mr. B. I showed him what was feasible with the current setup and what wasn’t. We had to make some tough choices, scale back some of the fancier ideas. The final “mrb restaurant” site isn’t the all-singing, all-dancing platform he initially dreamed of after all those “nephew suggestions.” But it works. The menu is clear. People can order. They can find the place. It’s stable, which is more than I can say for that pet social network.
So yeah, my practice with “mrb restaurant” was a reminder. A reminder that “simple” is almost never simple. And sometimes, the biggest part of the job is managing expectations, including your own, and remembering past trainwrecks so you don’t repeat them. It’s not just about coding; it’s about navigating the human element and the messy reality of projects.
