Our first loss

With great power, comes great responsibilities. -Peter Parker.

Now I understand what this means. Like J, I too was in a company before. The company allowed me to use xxx number of machines whenever I wanted. I often slept peacefully whilst these machines were at work for me. I remember times when I must have used all of them, tens of times, just to debug some small error. In Startupness its not really the same. You have to be responsible for all your actions and you cannot waste the precious CPU resources like I often used to do.

It was last Saturday when I was playing around with Amazon Web Services. (For all the non geeks out there, its a service which allows you to run your task on their distributed network without having to worry about issues such as system down time.) I just booted one of their machines, sshed into it, ran a small script and felt so happy. But then the disaster struck. In that moment of ecstasy I forgot to shut down the instance. As it happens, Amazon charges by the number of hours you use their machine and I realized it only today which ended up costing us $10.

In the end, it was not a lot but it did make me realize one thing, in Startupness you need to be responsible for every single action you take. It might have ended up costing 100s of dollars had J,by chance, not found this out today. Another great lesson for me today.

-PD