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Comment by brassattax | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting, thanks for sharing.

I hope this doesn't sound critical (because I like when people make a change for the better and share it), but before doing this, did you provide feedback to DigitalOcean regarding their menus? If so, did they respond?

Seems odd to me to create a Chrome Extension to change what would probably be a pretty minor change on DO's end for everyone's benefit.

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Hm, "simple changes" are almost never simple. To get it done, the following would likely need to happen:

Project managers would need to write a proposal and use cases. UX/design would need to meet and make wireframes and mocks. Engineers would need to nail down the technical design. The time and costs would have to be approved by management. They'd likely end up discussing the change with their biggest clients to make sure it doesn't interrupt their work flow. Eventually the engineers will be able to write a bit of code to make the change -- at which point QA will get their hands on it when they finally have time.

This is why suggestions like that are typically "put on the roadmap" with little likelihood of actually happening.

This is true to a degree at DO though these changes to language and positioning aren't quite so large to require everything you listed. We rolled out the copy change a few minutes ago to change "Notifications" to "Email Subscriptions" as suggested.

I wonder if this change breaks the extension, ha.

I can appreciate the flexibility you're offered even with the A-list clientele you have. In a world of "move fast and break things" I've re-worked that into my own mantra of "move fast and make things better."

In fintech we can't afford -- both figuratively and literally -- to break things, but you still have to allow your teams to take a crazy "bar napkin" idea and run with it without a bunch of red tape or you lose the competitive edge that makes you stand out.

Now changing the wording on a link isn't a crazy bar napkin idea, but it still demonstrates the flexibility you're afforded to make things better and I see a lot of value in that.

I think it depends on what type of company DO is. It's renaming one link and moving two others, there's really no need to additional wireframes etc. (This extension did that part for them)

That's pretty much how it works in bigger companies.

I actually did open a ticket.

Their support suggested I post on their UserVoice ( http://do.co/uservoice ) which I did and sent them the links. They've then passed the links "along to our control panel team so that they are aware".

I work in a similar software company and I know how much time it takes from an idea coming through to support > product managers > UI > implementation > QA > rolling out to production so I just built the extension myself.

This is great. Our teams here at DO took a look at the changes you implemented in the extension and while there is a process to things and we're looking at the other changes you implemented, the idea to change "Notifications" to "Email Subscriptions" in settings was an easy one to implement, so we did. This change went live a few minutes ago. Thanks for your great work on this and I hope that our change hasn't done anything to break your extension.

Wow, that was fast. Thanks DO :)! Hope you can make the other changes too in the future. Change does not break extension.

Digital Ocean, for as long as they've been around, have been rather finicky with regards to any third party suggestions. So, while I'm unsure of how the OP talked to them, I know I've had troubles in the past.

I have a friend who worked at DO several years ago and said the company culture was really dysfunctional. Really hard to get features out, bad organization. From what he said, I could imagine them not being responsive simply because they couldn't be.

Again, this was years ago - no commentary on DO 2017. I still use them for all of my personal projects.

To be fair is a plugin like this quite good to have when suggesting ideas. Just describing them does not take you as far.

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