Everyone has fantasies of what they think their life will be like, and of course, those projections change over time as reality unfolds. For me personally, the evolution of those fantasies has gone something like this:

Early 20s – I’m going to invent a new technology that will change the world for the better, and I’ll become a billionaire along the way!

Mid 20s – I’m going to start a business and be able to retire before I’m 30, then I’ll have the time and resources I need to do all that world changing stuff!

Late 20s – I guess I have a business making card sorting machines now. Not exactly what I envisioned for myself, but hey, still pretty cool! I’m going to work on really neat software development and grow this business into something incredible! Maybe I’ll still retire early and have time to change the world.

Early 30s – I just want to be able to write some code without my attention being pulled in eighteen different directions every day.

Now, I’m not saying I ever thought running a company was going to be easy, but I certainly did not appreciate just how administration-heavy it would be. What’s worse, that administrative load has increased quite linearly with the size of the company. Even so, I’ve been able to work on some software development here and there, and briefly embody my thirty-something dream:

But those windows are vanishingly brief. Enter, the CRA (Canada Revenue Agency, the Canadian equivalent of the USA’s IRS) and CSA Group (formerly Canadian Standards Association) with a double-whammy of regulatory oversight, and for the past month, those windows have disappeared entirely. Sigh. Now, please don’t get me wrong, I completely understand and appreciate that our government needs to ensure their money is not being misspent (via audits from the CRA), and commercial products need to be certified to ensure public safety (via certifying bodies such as the CSA Group), BUT, holy moly, do those processes ever derail a business! It may not be such a big deal for larger businesses, which can afford to pull an accountant and an engineer off their front lines to prepare the requisite documentation, but for a small business that’s just starting to find its legs, it amounts to a rather debilitating blow.

How this situation plays out for our business is as follows: the CEO (me) and CPO (Dan), each of whom have two young children by the way, get to spend all of their evenings and weekends – for a full month – compiling a 65-page, 20,000-word report, with 30 cited references, detailing their SR&ED (scientific research and experimental development) activities so that our technical auditor is suitably satisfied that we are not some scam company. Glurf. GLURF I SAY! You try simultaneously running a business, dealing with a CRA audit and product certification report update, raising two little kids, and let’s see what mental and emotional shape you are in (not to mention what shape your marriage is in :face_with_spiral_eyes:)!
Thus, the reality of my thirty-something existence is a lot closer to this:

Yes, I realize the above image is literally a cartoon (plus, I only have two kids, not three), but it pretty accurately represents my life over the past several weeks.
“Assuming all of what you say is true,” you ask, “how the heck are you finding the time to write this blog post?” A fair question. At this exact moment in time, my eight-month-old daughter is napping, and my wife has taken our three-year-old son to a friend’s birthday party. I have a rare few moments to myself. I guess I find writing cathartic. Not writing mega reports explaining technical conformity and compliance to the government and/or certification authorities, mind you, but “creative writing”. Sigh.

You know things are grim when the internet is your therapist. That’s all kinds of bad news. Speaking of which, my God, who are all of these people on the internet, and who gave them permission to be on here?! “When will you make a personal card sorting machine?”, and “When will your machines be free”, and “Where do babies come from?”, and the like. YOU CAN FIND ANSWERS TO ALL OF THESE QUESTIONS WITH LESS THAN FIVE FLIPPIN’ MINUTES OF GOOGLING, GAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!

It is startling and disconcerting to be incessantly reminded that the vast majority of people in this world do not read anything but the titles of articles! On this front, hats off to you, intrepid reader! Here you are, multiple paragraphs into a blog post. Clearly, you’re one of the good ones and may comfortably ignore my criticisms of humanity at large. OK, I am certainly rambling at this point, and bordering onto a diatribe, but I’ll get one more derivative point in here. How many people’s butts do you wipe every day? Probably just one. Well, I generally get to clean three people’s bums every day. That, plus dealing with everything else I have described above.

The good news is that this rather horrifying period of super-administrative burden is coming to an end. The reports are written, the deadlines are imminent, and we can finally get back to actually running our company. Instead of writing about all the development we did last year, we can get back to actually making developments this year! Woooo! I JUST WANT TO CODE!

As always, thank you to our customers for your patience. Lots of good things are coming down the pike, and we are excited to keep building cool stuff 🙂