You need to stop at perfection \ stacker news ~tech

1897 sats \ 9 comments \ @NoStranger 2 Nov 2023 tech

This is my personal opinion on a general topic, but I hope some of you share my way of thinking.

When building software you do it for many reasons, for passionate developers most are just for fun or experimentation, but when you plan to make a software become an actual product or a tool, even if just for yourself, you almost for sure have a single, simple goal in mind, every aspect and features end developed to achieve that goal.

This is what I call perfection. An app, game, website, whatever, that does what you really need and nothing more.

Once you reach this perfection, please, stop developing, the only actions you should take are bug fixes or corrections solely for the main goal.

I'm tired to see so many software adding more and more and more until they become so bloated that the only solution is to switch to something else, and this is only an endless cycle.

I also talk from some personal experience, at work I'm required to keep adding so many feature for so many generic use cases that the software we built can't even be verbally described to our clients without less that a couple hours and not without confusing them at least a bit. There's no goal anymore, a simple and clever concept was completely destroyed for the greed, and thoughtless excitement of graowing and gaining more.

Perfection is much easier to achieve than you might think...

Hope to hear what you think too.

Cheers! 🤗

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111 sats \ 4 replies \ @SimpleStacker 2 Nov 2023

It's easier said than done. Even if you're a perfectly altruistic owner of a software company, how will you know when to stop adding features?

Will you trust the word of your employees? They have an incentive to add features to make their work look valuable.
Will you rely on revenue and sales statistics? These can take a while to manifest, and even then they might come from a locked-in customer base so there isn't a 1:1 relation to product quality
Will you wait for customers to request features? By then it may be too late. When a significant number of customers are asking for a feature, a competitor may already have introduced these features and poached away customers
Will you rely on your own instinct? Your instincts might be wrong

I agree with your general sentiment, but I'm just pessimistic that this is something that we can get right 100% of the time. The best we can do is make sure the markets are competitive so that as soon as product quality gets worse, market signals are sent rapidly to the companies and they can adjust.

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @NoStranger OP 2 Nov 2023

I appreciate you pessimism, it help to see the other side of the coin.

Surely I won't even say a word to my boss for requesting blatantly useless features, but from what I can say about my job, we have a software with, at least, 50 quite complex features, requested for "matching the market" that are used by a single customer at most and we have to adapt them without questioning the logic of such requests just to please them and ended up building lot of incompatibile systems that can only be thrown away at best if a single customer leaves.

What you say is absolutely right if there was someone with a brain taking decisions, my post is more a way to vent my frustrations.

My lesson learned is that I won't let my passion projects ever come close to such a situation, once it reaches the "it works as I want", I'll stop adding more to it, unless I need to.

As an example, I've built an app for myself only, and I never touched the code for almost a year, it was "perfect" for my needs, then I needed it to sync across devices (it is a local first app) and now I've added a sync system for it, it's a new feature, but it still does just what originally needed and nothing more. If I needed more I'd just make something else to use along side that one.

I hope this example can help you understand my reasoning.

Also, the definition of perfection is highly personal, what would you consider "perfect"?

I'm really interested in other viewpoints. 😎

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @southside263 2 Nov 2023

efficiency maxi >

bitcoin is about that life.

fiat mining (non bitcoin projects) is str8 up ticking boxes and pleasing customers - *tear

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @NoStranger OP 2 Nov 2023

The fact that angers me the most is promising something non-existent just to make some shitty customer happy and then having run to do it half-assedly just to get complaints for it.

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @southside263 2 Nov 2023

🤦‍♂️

60 sats \ 1 reply \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 3 Nov 2023

I hope you’re not speaking of new features on SN lol

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @NoStranger OP 3 Nov 2023

No, I never said anything about it, to me it's already feature complete. 😎

SN is made by great people and I'm sure they will think a lot before putting more stuff in it.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @bitcoin_rationalist 2 Nov 2023

You are perfect just the way you are

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @NoStranger OP 2 Nov 2023

Oh you... 😘