Losing Steerage

Tonight I finally told my business partner that so long as I have a full time job, I don't have the time to do a good job with this startup.  It felt incredibly good to say it, and I'm not sure I realized how frustrated I've been until I said it.  I don't like not doing a good job.  I hate it.

Unfortunately, people who can do what I do and are willing to do it for so little don't grow on trees.  She may meet another business partner.  Until or unless that happens, I'm going to keep working on this.  There is a chance we could get some serious capital from investors, and then just pay one of those stupid app development companies, or hire a real, competent, employee coder for a competitive wage.  As little time as I have, I'll always have time to look at code reviews and boss someone around.

I feel a little guilty;  she really really really really wants this business to work.  She believes in her idea 100% and the only thing holding it back, ostensibly, is my inability to do two full time jobs at once.  Though I empathize with her dream, I really should have had this conversation much earlier...probably about 4 months ago.  Idk.  At that time we were in the middle of waiting for one of the bottom feeder craigslist programmers to fix a bug.   Whatever.  Best time to plant a tree and all that.

There is a chance I will quit my day job (or best case scenario: get fired with severance).  Its a rather small chance though.

So the groundwork has been laid for me to part ways with this startup without sinking it.

Ironically, if my business partner did find a coder-partner to replace me, I would be tempted to do even more work, because I would want to re-write about 70% of the code and delete the source control history before another human being sees what I've done in there.

The best option, really, is that she should just learn how to fucking code, and code it herself.  There is some folk wisdom out there about how its best if the programmer uses his own software, and recently I've become more and more convinced there is truth in that conjecture.  I've been hearing a lot about these new website specifically aimed at helping women learn to program.  The problem is, everybody treats programming like some kind of mystical art that can be performed only by smart or elite people.  If only the general public knew how stupid programmers can really be.