Now I run an app. Most of what I type still doesn't fully make sense to me.
I'm writing this for the doctor sitting on an idea they can't shake, who keeps almost-starting and not-starting, who's bookmarked three coding courses they haven't begun. I see you. I was you ten months ago. Let me save you some time.
There are a hundred reasons not to start building something. I tried most of them. Here are the three I wish someone had taken away from me on day one.
You don't need to learn to code first
I know. Every instinct is telling you to do a course first. Get the foundations. Be responsible.
Don't. It's a trap.
The course is the thing you do when you want to feel like you're starting without the discomfort of actually starting. You'll do three modules. Lose the thread. Feel guilty for a few weeks. Quietly let it die.
I've done this twice. I have certificates. They're worthless.
The way you actually learn is by trying to build something, hitting a problem, asking an what to do, fixing it badly, and moving on. You learn the words in context. The way a child learns a language. Slowly, then all at once.
You will not understand what you're typing for the first three weeks. That's fine. I didn't either. The understanding comes after the building, not before.
That's the entire trick.
Stop bookmarking courses. Open a new project.
Your domain knowledge is the hard part. You already have it.
This is the bit that took me longest to believe.
Every doctor I've spoken to about building assumes engineers have the hard skill and we have the soft skill. We're wrong. It's the other way round.
Code is a commodity now. The will write it for anyone with a laptop and patience. What the can't do is tell you which problem in healthcare is worth solving. Which data matters to a junior doctor at 2am. Which features feel insulting and which feel respectful. That part is yours.
I built MedRank because I'd been a junior doctor ranking hospitals on a spreadsheet at 2am, the year before. I knew what it felt like. I knew which questions got asked on WhatsApp groups, and which ones never did. An engineer with twice my technical ability couldn't have built it. They wouldn't have known which bit hurt.
You have years of this. Every clinic. Every shift. Every system you've cursed under your breath. That's domain knowledge accumulating. You're not behind on the technical side. You're miles ahead on the part that actually matters.
Nobody tells doctors their lived experience is worth anything outside the hospital. It is. It might be the only thing worth anything.
Stop apologising for it.
You will quit. Plan for it.
Around week 6 to week 10, you will hit a wall. You will stop.
The wall is real. Mine was a connection that wouldn't take. I closed the laptop. I didn't open it for two months.
Yours will look different. It'll feel the same. The quiet conviction that you've been kidding yourself. That you're not technical enough. That this was never going to work.
The conviction is wrong. It's also persuasive. It will win unless you're expecting it.
Here's what I wish someone had told me at week zero: the wall is the project. Everyone hits it. The people who finish things aren't the ones who don't hit walls. They're the ones who recognise the wall when they see it, and don't take it personally.
When you stop, don't tell yourself you've quit. Tell yourself you're in the gap. The gap is part of the build. Take a week off. Take two. Come back and start over in a different order. Or stare at the same problem with fresh eyes. Both work.
The only fatal version of the gap is the one where you decide it means something about you.
It doesn't. It means you're roughly halfway through.
What this adds up to
If you're a doctor sitting on an idea, the three things in your way are probably these. You think you need to learn to code first. You don't believe your domain knowledge is the hard part. You assume the wall in the middle means you're not cut out for it.
None of these are true. They're just the things every non-developer believes. They're the reason most ideas die in a Notes app.
Eight months ago I'd never written a line of code. Today I run a small platform that helps junior doctors decide where to spend three years of their lives. I'm not special. I just stopped waiting for permission, and pushed past the bit where I assumed I couldn't.
You can do the same thing. Probably faster than I did.
Open the laptop.
MedRank series