The unseen development of Coreto

Coreto. Learn, earn, repeat.

When we’re in the heat of a development cycle, we tend to move quickly from task to task and not give ourselves enough time to reflect and absorb all that comes with our progress.

With 2021 ending, we looked back at the last twelve months, the challenges we faced, and the lessons we learned over the past year.

We analyzed what worked, what didn’t, and how we can improve. So I decided to share a few of our conclusions.

With the hope that it will benefit you at least as much as it does us, let’s have a look at some of the lessons 2021 left us with.

Appreciate your achievements

One of the hardest lessons we had to learn in 2021 was to look back at our achievements, at every milestone and the progress we make, and really take it in. Appreciate every small “win”!

We are a driven team, and we always want and expect more from ourselves. This has sometimes prevented us from enjoying the moment. That feeling of completion is a powerful source of energy and it should be an active part of the development process.

The moral of the story? Take a moment, smile, and feel good about the work you do.

And since we’re on the subject of taking moments for yourself…

Take time to rest

Another important part of every development cycle is rest.

When working on any project, and especially large-scale projects that require switching back and forth between multiple scopes and ideas, taking the time to rest properly is very important.

And so much more so in the current times, when most people are working from home.

Our team resides in different cities and countries and we are all working from home. It has served us very well and has allowed us to be flexible and fast on our feet. But not having a proper delimitation between work and personal space has sometimes led to us putting in more hours in the day than we might have wanted. Not because someone else was pushing us to do it, but because there’s always “one last thing” to finish before calling it a day.

Even though we know this from all the years of our previous experience, we sometimes get caught up in the moment and this leads to us getting overworked or starting to burn out.

So, always remember: rest is part of the development process.

Oh, and one more thing.

Always aim for balance

Before releasing the first version of any project, things follow a predictable schedule and you mostly just have to keep to the timeline.

After launching an ALPHA version – as we did on April 12, 2021 – and feedback starts coming in from the early testers, things can become a little less predictable. No matter how much internal testing you do as a developer, there will always be things you miss. And the actual users will always surprise you with new scenarios and new ways to use and push your product to its limits.

This can sometimes become disruptive, as there are times when you get bursts of plentiful feedback issues in your backlog. These need filtering, duplicates need removing or merging, the need of assigning priority to each task, and so on. All this while building new features, expanding ideas, adjusting scopes, and – of course – testing on all fronts.

There is no magical formula for how to keep everything on track. But there is a way to adapt to it.

Previous experience has taught us to always aim for balance.

What this means is to constantly adjust your workflow, discuss things and make a goal of finding that sweet spot that brings balance to your team (or in our case – teams) on all fronts.

This has worked very well for us at Coreto. Finding balance was one of the ways we managed to maintain a good development speed, good communication between our teams, and has helped us do more in the last year than most people believed we could.

And it’s not just about finding balance in your development workflow. Balance is important on every level, from human interaction to coordinating on shared goals, and between your work life vs your personal life.

Do you know what helps in finding balance?

Start planning early

One thing we all knew from the very beginning was this: start planning early!

I have seen many teams over the years that did not take the time to plan things in detail from the very beginning. As a result, many of the projects came out either incomplete or unusable.

In my past experience, I was lucky enough to work with people that understood the need for planning in advance, and one of those people was our CEO, Iustina.

Knowing how big the benefits are in the long run, we adopted this mindset from the very beginning of the project and started planning in advance before anything else.

This meant that we knew what our end goal was before ever writing a single line of code, and we follow that plan even now.

But there’s a catch! Planning ahead for a timeline spanning years of development has its limitations, as in our industry things change at a faster pace than any other!

So what can we do about it?

Prepare to adapt

In a fast-paced industry like software development, long-term projects sometimes get left behind before they even see the light of day.

Why? There are multiple reasons:

• new/better tech becomes available
• meeting new standards
• the scope of the project changes over a long enough period
• the industry shifts
• user interests change
• and many more.

On the other end, other projects change too much, too often. They remain in a never-ending improvement cycle and never get around to releasing the final product.

What’s the key, you ask? Finding the right balance.

At Coreto we set out to deliver a clear vision, and have a clear plan of how to get it done. But we also know that the road ahead was never a straight line. A lot will happen over a single year, let alone three, five, or more. New ideas will emerge, new opportunities will present themselves and priorities need adjustment for different reasons – from development needs to industry shifts.

So, always be prepared to adapt, but never lose sight of your goals and vision!

But the most important lesson is that…

Communication is key!

With all the moving parts involved in developing a platform like Coreto, and all the different teams and stakeholders around it, good communication is a must!

Be it between team members, between different teams or between us and the community at large, we believe that there should always be an open channel available.

While this has been a natural element internally, we also do our best for our involvement with you, our community and early investors. This extends to how we approach new partners as well, how we choose our AMAs and why we do it in our own Telegram Group as well as outside of it, and why we always do our best to answer your questions any time we get the chance to.

We view Transparency and Openness as crucial elements to any trustworthy project, and most importantly for Coreto.

We are aware that we can do better!

One thing that we know we can improve is sharing our progress between the important milestones that we reach. While we’ve always had Development Updates accompanying our new feature releases or larger updates, we noticed that our community is eager to get closer to the project and the involvement with its development.

We have set a goal for ourselves to do a better job in 2022!

What we mean to say is we plan to also share with you smaller progress/updates and do it more often.

And on that note…

COR Token is going LIVE on January 6th 2022

That’s right! We’re dropping our testing token (vCOR) and bringing $COR LIVE on the platform!

Our MetaMask integration for all supported blockchains has passed the final testing phase and is ready for release. You will be able to deposit and withdraw $COR to and from the platform, and start using and earning it while building up your reputation.

As it’s never a good idea to launch new releases right before holidays, we decided to avoid this oh-so-often mistake in every developer’s life, and schedule it as the first thing we do in the new year!

As a quick reminder, you can have another look at current and future use cases for the COR Token, the first of which has been the Staking of Opinion Pools feature.

Of course, those are just a few, as the list is much longer and ever-expanding. Have a look at our Tokenomics page for more information about the COR Token and don’t forget about our ongoing Staking Programs.

From the whole Coreto team: Have a great 2022!