THE ESTIMATION MIRAGE

[Qodestackr]

THE ESTIMATION MIRAGE: BUILDING IN THE MATATU LANE

Roadmap? More like road-myth. (In the matatu game, you fix the engine while moving - same with code)

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CODE IN THE FAST LANE

1. Deadlines Don't Honk

You think that 2-week sprint is sacred? The road has potholes.

• "We'll add M-Pesa bulk pay Friday" becomes "Why's Safaricom's API returning goats?" on Thursday 4PM.
• Your 1-hour USSD flow optimization? Now includes teaching SACCO grandpas ASCII encoding via WhatsApp.

Survival Rule:
Estimate × 3. Then add 2 matatu breakdowns and 1 M-Pesa outage.

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2. Debugging in the Breakdown Lane

That "simple" photo claims feature?

Day 1: "We'll use OpenCV for dent detection!"
Day 3: "Why are drivers uploading goat selfies?"
Day 5: Training AI to ignore "wueehh, this scratch is from my wife" captions.

...
Dealing with different SACCO route politics → Rush your code, get cursed by production.

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3. The MVP Matatu

Your "1-week" SACCO dashboard:

• Week 1: Shows policy counts (but crashes if >100 matatus)
• Week 3: Now with... CSV upload! (But only .xls from 2003)
• Week 6: "Fleet Analytics" = 3 pie charts that lie beautifully

Hustler Truth:
A working matatu with one headlight > shiny bus stuck in garage.

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THE POETRY OF BROKEN PROMISES

"We'll integrate NTSA in a day!"
...said no engineer who's seen Kenya's API docs.

Your "24-hour claims" dream meets:

• Garage guys taking 6hrs to reply "ni sawa"
• Drivers snapping photos of their shoes "kwa ajili ya evidence"

But here's the magic:
Your best code emerges from the exhaust fumes of ‘almost there’.

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But...

1. → Time burns, features shrink
2. → One tested endpoint > Ten "working in Postman"
3. → SACCO admins will ALWAYS upload CSV as PDF
4. → USSD sessions die faster than matatu brake pads

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LAST WARNING:
That "quick AI model" will demand:

• Swahili curse word datasets (A crash course in matatu damage slang.)
• 10,000 matatu dent photos (half of them blurry)
• ...So Training it to ignore blurry dashboard cam shots from 2010.
• Explaining to a garage guy why "JPEG inside a Word doc" isn't a dataset.
• Handling SACCO admins uploading scans of printed spreadsheets.

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ROADMAN CODING MANIFESTO:
Estimate like a n00b. Build like a matatu mechanic on a lunch break.
Ship before the cops flag you for over-engineering.Ship before the cops flag you for overthinking the route
Deploy before NTSA asks for 'just one more document.

— Typed out between M-Pesa timeouts and a SACCO chairman's 3AM WhatsApps

[Qodestackr]

🥇The struggle is the syllabus. And every glitch is just extra credit.