A practical guide to getting things done without getting in your own way
Failure isn't optional — it's inevitable. So why not embrace it? This field manual contains battle-tested principles for those who care more about getting things done than looking smart while doing it.
Failure isn't optional — it's inevitable. So why drag it out?
Get to failing early, get to laughing faster. Building my own sites, like AyotteForge, wasn't a case of "getting it right the first time." It was a case of "how many different ways can I crash this before it finally flies?"
Every bad deployment, broken link, or chat app meltdown taught me more than any "perfect" launch ever could. Fail with flair. Wipe out with style.
If something works perfectly the first time, assume it's lying to you.
I've seen it too many times: you think it's golden, then the second a real user — or, hell, my girlfriend Roberta — touches it, everything explodes.
Perfect is suspicious. Perfect hides bugs. Perfect needs testing, smashing, and "Dennis Proofing" before you trust it.
When the AyotteForge chatbot first launched, it looked beautiful. Clean. Sharp. Like a model ready for the runway. Then I did what every smart dumbass does: I fed it garbage. Nicknames like CaptainStupidFace. Emojis that looked like an alien invasion. Twenty-seven spaces between words. It broke faster than a dollar-store chair. Moral of the story? Never trust "perfect" until you've Dennis-proofed it.
Smart people quit when things get messy. Captain Dumbass® just finds a new door to kick open.
When UnrealJava.com went under thanks to tariffs and crappy sales, did I quit? Hell no. I pivoted. I built new ventures. I took the hit, learned the lesson, and kept moving.
Momentum beats perfection. Always. If a door slams in your face, find a window. If the window locks, find a sledgehammer.
Perfection is the enemy of progress.
I'm not saying "half-ass everything." I'm saying "get it good enough to run, and improve it while it's alive."
AyotteForge, even my personal sites — none of them launched perfect. They launched "good enough to ship" and got better over time.
If you wait for "perfect," you'll wait forever. Good enough gets you in the game. Great happens during overtime.
When I first tried to launch AyotteForge on AWS, it turned into a full-day wrestling match. Configuring, tweaking, fixing — and after hours of banging my head against the wall, I finally said "screw it" and deleted the whole damn thing. Later, I set it up better, faster, and more stable on my own Ubuntu server at home. Good enough wasn't about forcing a broken setup to work — it was about knowing when to cut bait and build smarter.
Fancy logos, slick animations, complex backend systems — they're traps.
If you spend three months picking fonts, you're not building, you're hiding. Get the damn thing live first.
Captain Dumbass® doesn't need a golden ship; he needs something that floats.
Once you're afloat, THEN you can slap on the chrome and the neon lights if you feel like it.
One time while building a chat server, I spent two days chasing some fancy auto-scroll JavaScript perfection. Know what fixed it? Adding one line of basic code and walking away for an hour. Sometimes, Captain Dumbass® needs a coffee more than he needs another "clever solution." Shipping something ugly that works beats polishing something beautiful that doesn't. Every. Single. Time.
The real secret?
Captain Dumbass® doesn't care about looking smart. He cares about finishing the mission.
That's why we win.
Most people are so terrified of failing publicly that they never try. Captain Dumbass® throws his hat in the ring, trips over it, gets back up, and wins because he's still standing while others are still planning.
You want to build something real? You want to make a difference?
Congratulations, Captain. You're already half dumbass. Now go be brilliant about it.
End Transmission