Being made redundant from a position where I defined patterns and practices for a high-performance team, I decided to take the leap to create my own startup. As I write now, this has felt like a violent acceleration of the clock. One day you feel the safety of an established enterprise; the next, there I am, standing on a clean slate. When I finally received my new laptop last week, I felt the sudden urge to rush, install the software I needed, and start churning out lines of code.