When to Pivot

Day 11

One of the harder things with programming on a deadline is when it's time to pivot and deciding the right amount of risk. I hit that today with the Lonestar app I've been working on. The features need to be live by the end of the month, but when I got it the code wasn't necessarily in a working state and the deployment pipeline was lost. Creating a new deployment has a lot of uncertainty, up to me having to rip out and rewrite the database and back-end.

I had the option of starting over with a simpler project to get the functionality that's required to work, then add the functionality to what's currently out there. I realized today that if I didn't start the alternative, I'd run out of time to have that as an option.

A more basic site that has the required features or a prettier, feature-packed site that can hit any number of deployment and database issues when I try to stand it up. Which would you choose?

(I started the simpler site last night)