The saddest “Just Ship It” story
kitze.io
kitze.io
Also, if I learned anything over the last few decades it is that the market supports many solutions to the same problem. Why do software developers believe that if someone gets there first that's it it's done? Someone invented and sells a toaster? Done. Someone started selling bikes? Better ditch my step design. Cars? Just one brand, obviously.
People release apps into oversaturated markets every day. Most fail, some do well, and not because they were better in every way than the competition, just because they were different, they were tried, and some people found them to be 'Good Enough'.
Honestly? I think people (in the general sense) are constrained to the amount of complexity they can handle and the world is a complex place so they fall back on picking a choice/hill to die on as a way of reducing the complexity.
Not a new thing, I work with a guy who is an excellent programmer but will argue for ever that OOP is the right way to build software and that he doesn't see the point in functional programming while writing code with map and reduce inside class methods..
The benefit of a dogmatic approach is you never have to question it (otherwise it wouldn't be dogmatic), small government good, efficiency of the market, nuclear bad, nuclear good, emacs better than vim, vim better than emacs, chrome better than firefox, linux better than windows, mac better than PC, religion good, religion bad - pick a side and never think again(TM).
In reality nearly all of life is some variant of "it depends" and there should be no shame in saying "I don't know enough to have an opinion" and if its important then you go look into it.
The fundamental problem is "reasonably informed opinion held until presented evidence one way or the other" is more work than "strong opinions, loosely held".
reality: this is too complex for me rationalization: I didn't think there was market fit
reality: It's hard to learn technology x rationalization: OOP / framework / language sucks
And by that I mean, can't we all just gang up on nano?
one it is very simple and intuitive
And two, it has the (two? It has been a few years) row footer that literally tells you what buttons to push to save or exit. I didn't know how to exit vim when I first started with git, as is tradition.
I've introduced a few people to Vim and I have to start out with an apology for how annoying it is to close. If the user hammers the Esc key, it should at least flash up with a hint of how to quit.
It does this if you press ctrl-c, so it's not as if it can't be done.
(gVim Easy seems to just be gVim restricted to insert mode. Not sure I see the sense in that - isn't that just Notepad++ but worse?)
If I could change one thing about curl, it would be for -L to be the default behaviour, so that it would just do the right thing regarding redirects. Instead, wget does the right thing by default, but curl always needs the flag.
(I'm also fond of Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.)
If they're already comfortable with the command-line, but don't know Vim or Emacs, I'd keep encouraging them to take the dive.
Of course, there's also gVim, so perhaps that's not quite the right way to think about it.
Something about software development attracts people who are underconfident and anxious (or perhaps writing software makes people like that). There's very little support or mentoring, soft skills like kindness, helpfulness and giving constructive feedback are looked down on, and people's first introduction to software (games) is all about competitiveness and winning. The 'heroes' of software are people who have made incredible things and rarely talk about their mistakes. Consequently a lot of developers look for reasons to give up as early as possible because everything they've learned tells them failure is something to avoid at all costs.
Very sadly, in my opinion, the industry doesn't celebrate the effort. It's only about the results. Not having the first mover advantage is seen as a reason why you'll probably fail.
What's slightly odd is that this attitude isn't so common in actual software. Developers are falling over themselves to work on new libraries and frameworks regardless of how many exist already.
I have been trying to develop my own soft skills. I used to think things like small talk were a waste of time. I didn’t realize they were a way to open the lines of communication which you can then build up to something substantial. I don’t feel soft skills in this industry are frowned upon so much as people (like myself) are just a little ignorant about them. I’ve noticed devs can give some really blunt feedback and genuinely think they’re being helpful, and they are! But a person receiving the feedback who already isn’t confident can feel like they’re being criticized. The two people need to almost meet half way. Be confident enough to take the feedback, and be a little more careful with your words when you give it.
If your intention is to be "the" product or project that people use for their unmet desires, then when that goal is fulfilled by another project/product already, and considerably better, you end up wondering what all your time and energy is contributing to the task of solving the problem. It's solved already, and other people have put in all that time and effort refining the solution already, so you'll just feel like you're playing catch up.
The vast majority of the time I program because there is this thing I need to do but none of the software available allows me to do it at all. I don't mean buggily or with shareware popups or as a paid product, I mean at all. The only way for me to do the specific thing I want is to program a solution to do it for me.
So suppose someone else comes along and has the exact same problem and comes up with a solution. Usually I'll just use it instead of spending more time. The solution is all I needed.
In this case the programming is only a thing I have to get out of the way in order to accomplish what I want. I don't care about maintenance or if anyone else has the same problem or if anyone else even comes up with the same solution. All I care about is doing the thing.
In these cases I will accept any solution, whether or not it's mine. Some people are just better at programming given the same time constraints. It does wound my ego a little, but using their solution immediately instead of putting all the effort into an inferior solution means I do what I wanted to do and move on to more important things.
What actually wounds my ego is when the project is intended to be used by other people. This means those people might not choose the same solution as me collectively between multiple different options. So now I do have to care about maintenance and having something to offer above everyone else's solution, because otherwise nobody is going to care about all the effort I'm putting into this solution.
The author appears to be a mixture of both, if I'm understanding correctly. When another competitor came along that did everything he envisioned his product would do he grudgingly signed up for it - because the product allowed him to do the thing he wanted to do all along. And he also wanted to be understood, to be a somebody with specific domain knowledge about this specific problem he encountered, and not being able to be that person since someone else already filled that gap was devastating.
I mean, we can celebrate effort, but there's almost nothing more demotivating to me than spending years on a problem only to find that someone else did it and simply did it better than you, so you start thinking, "if only I could have learned about all these other things instead of spending years fumbling around with programming specifics in order to satisfy this one need, which would have been satisfied anyways if I was just patient enough."
And it's also so, so easy to just state "just use X" and make it so much worse for the formerly motivated person. This is why social media will never fundamentally nourish people like me. Nobody can understand the context of two years of hard work when you just ask a simple question about what you feel about problem X or Y. At the same time, you can't argue with measurable improvements in correctness or efficiency, so in those cases some people like me find no other option except to get depressed. Then you would ask: "can anyone blame me for feeling like this?" Well, they would. "Pay more attention next time," "git gud," etc, etc...
I think it might be impossible to avoid comparisons on a time or money basis when you have multiple solutions to the same problem that average people can choose from. They rarely just say "they're both good in different ways." At some point all I've learned is you just have to either deny reality or somehow get over the fact that some people are just better than you for inexplicable reasons. One mindset allows me to have a chance at accomplishing anything at all, the other leads to depression and never so much as attempting anything. I wish I knew better.
"just start a monopoly" the literature says... implying every venture that's not would surely be a waste of time
but even (and especially) if you're the first mover, sharks will come
will you use their presence as a convenient excuse? or are you up for the fight?
How many times has someone mentioned an app and you say I've already looked at it and it's a piece of junk? Or gotten an email saying we just shipped version 2 and you're really going to like it and you just hit delete?
That's why I personally think you're better off starting slow and getting a small base of customers. Save the press announcements or Product Hunt posting until you've got product market fit and have at least a bit of polish on your project.
People don't care so much about small bugs, developers do. People care about bugs that stop them doing what they need to do.
It doesn't help that when you come to HN or Reddit releasing something, the comments are quick to point out other competing products in a seemingly snarky way.
"I use X. It has that feature plus these other ones. Why would I switch to yours?" I get the spirit of why someone would say that, but it's really hard to read tone in a forum post.
I don't know, man? Don't?
Maybe I'm naïve but don't see it as snark most of the time. I see those posts as "here is some springboard for you to share the product or your vision and goals.
Sometimes it is genuine snark but I like to believe it is usually curiosity even if it isn't true.
I mean look at Dropbox. The basic idea is so simple. If you've used rsync/robocopy you might think it is ridiculous this product even exists. Doubly so if you're aware of how cloud providers charge so much for network traffic. Even Google Drive unlimited has to cap the amount of data transfer in a day. But there are always ways. For example, I think Dropbox has now limited free users to three syncing devices.
Or gitlab. Like huh? But GitHub exists. And surely git-web or gitea is better suited for a web interface for git? But then gitlab has almost nothing to do with git. As far as I understand, the goal of gitlab has always been to be a complete product.
I bring up these two examples because maybe the comments were snark but the founders seemed to handle it pretty well in both cases (at least publicly). I think their self-confidence shows in the product.
I mean, only if you also have no understanding of other people having different backgrounds, skillsets and experiences?
An undercurrent that runs through a lot of Software Developers is that they have to be “clever”. We’re not making shitty toasters, we’re writing products that shake industries and build powerful competitive advantages.
Therefore, if you copy something that already exists, you’re not clever, you’re an imposter, a copycat, shame on you.
It is not enough to be successful, you must be successful and unique, otherwise you might as well go build chairs or something.
I guess programmers usually avoid pitching. That's why they choose the "easy" path - develop something that's never been done before. But it's actually the hardest thing to do.
Mentally speaking: I have optimized my thinking on not doing things twice, not being wasteful, lean, reusing components etc.
If it is solved, there is little reason why i would/should solve it again and yes from a pure thinking perspective, it would make sense to pool all resources together to have one car brand.
The same with a Toaster. Make one good Toaster, make it slightly configurable so you have choices in color and thats it.
This type of efficient thinking is why i get paid.
Are they precisely equally dumb according to measurements, or did you oversimplify to make a point?
Because this mantra is being applied to a group of people who almost universally wait longer than they should. It is never going to get interpreted as "ship when all you have is hello world". It is going to act as a push to ship earlier, when it's uncomfortable, before you feel ready.
Basically it's relative rather than absolute "ship earlier than you think you should". And there is nothing wrong with a succinct formulation of that concept.
To further elaborate, if you're first you can have an unpolished product which grants you gratification sooner and with less effort. If you want to enter an existing market you have to gain customers with much effort and risk (the competition can react).
Side note: the better toaster was sold first in the 50s and doesn't stop anyone of selling worse toasters :D [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage (1) The first iPhone was the first smartphone as defined today. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
There are plenty of ways to compete with existing products, especially if they haven't achieved market dominance. The key thing is can you offer anything they don't. Quality, cost, features, ease of use, etc. What part of the market does their product not address, preferably in a way it's hard for their product to be adapted for.
Two reasons why not.
1. Wasn't first, e.g. HTC Touch was very close in terms of UX and form factor, released a month before iPhone.
2. Wasn't a smartphone as defined today. At launch it didn't have app store nor any user-installable apps at all, these features arrived much later.
If you think that's an oversimplified polarization, click on this blog post at the bottom.
"You're either a Zero or a One"
"You have either reached your goal, or you haven't"
In other words, life is a destination, not a journey. Yeah, nah.
The code I had written before would have been impossible to maintain, their code was written in a language I hadn't used before, and our databases were different enough that trying to merge things would have been insane.
After wailing and licking my wounds for a day I decided that just because they’ve done that doesn’t mean the game is over. I actually decided it was an advantage because I could just copy their approach to solving certain thorny UI challenges.
Also, it’s validation for my idea. Until I saw that I thought maybe the idea was just a pipe dream.
It’s dumb to drop a project just cause someone else did it.
Maybe programmers tend to give up when they see someone else did it because programmers think the code is the business or the code is the win or the code is the success or something, when in fact success is much more than the code.
In all fairness, it might be that a marketeer has the opposite view of this. This is how I came to realize that you need each other.
You need teams, eventually, maybe not in all cases, but definitely in a lot of them.
For the coding school idea, I imagine some level of referrals would be one of the first tools at your disposal - something that should be native to the product itself.
Often you see some marketing gimmicks overlaid onto the structure of the site with clunky integrations, you need to make it so that your product by design supports referring as a strategy for it to win out.
For example, Dropbox had their referral tech built in (refer someone, get free storage etc...). They set their product up to utilise their chosen marketing strategy effectively at the base level of the product. At least, it felt like it was ingrained.
So I'm looking at that as market validation, and have now actually started building my own project. I think it is quite helpful that I no longer have the uncertainty of whether the project can successfully sustain itself, since the market validation has already been done, and it looks quite obvious that the demand is there.
I'm about 1.5y into a startup that's picking up steam, and I've stopped feeling worried about similar "ideas". We have a plan for who wants our product, what they care about, and how much they'll pay for it. We have an platform that can be used to support a plethora of unique marketable products. We have a sales team in place. There's so much more going on than the original "what if we used version control thinking with contracts and legal knowledge?"
We aggregated the reports into a website with a nice feed, and then we thought, what if instead of one feed about celebs, people could just post whatever they want via text messages and others could follow them and get the texts or view the feed of these short (140 characters or so?) posts on a website? It would be kinda cool.
But mobile providers would not allow us to send media messages, and we thought the idea just kinda sucked and is not worth a start-up, especially since now we have group text messaging in newer phones! And MMS support that we don't have.
So yeah, I've basically written a proto-Twitter a bit before Twitter existed (the gossip version also predated Gawker Stalker by a year), but the harsh reality is that it didn't take off because of me and the people I worked on this with weren't made of the stuff of people who start billion dollar companies.
So there I stood in front of 200-300 entrepreneurs and investors and internet pioneers (there were even a couple of billionaires or people who later became billionaires in that crowd), and I pitched it to them so they'd register and use it.
The response was pretty lukewarm and only few people used it. And not a single one saw anything special about the idea. Which again, is probably how I presented it more than anything.
But anyway the moral of the story is that contrary to popular belief, being in the right place at the right time, AND coming up with a "how come on one thought of that before" idea before anyone else, AND actually delivering a nice MVP - all those are not enough. Eventually it comes down to things like tenacity and charisma and boldness and obviously luck.
When I started, there was kind of a website to do this already, but it was absolutely awful and I knew I could do way better.
So I did. I spent 100-150 hours working out all the math and coding up the program to reproduce that placard from terrain data. I still have all my notes. It was kinda slow — one panorama took 4-6 minutes to draw — but it worked.
And then I didn’t ship. Life got in the way, and it was always harder for me to do the second 50% than the first, even though in this case the first 50% was way harder.
Three years later, one of my friends shared an app with me, just released. It did the same thing. The author did a good job describing how I felt then too, how the app was good but I hated it anyway. I never used it, probably because I ended up moving overseas anyway to a place without free high-res terrain data.
That was my best chance to date to do something I’ve always dreamed about: make something cool that a lot of people love to use. Novel, good ideas like that don’t come along very often.
> I just dropped it.
This sounds like a great project and a really good outcome. OP learned a lot and the project provided motivation for him to explore interesting tech and gain real insights about the drawbacks of each. If I had gotten that much of all my side projects that would be great!
If your expectation is that each side project will turn into an Instagram style success story, you’ll most likely never be happy.
For those interested, here’s my app’s most popular YouTube video: https://youtu.be/hnqUP1CZd24
My project is an electron app for printing labels. You can find more info at https://label.live
I understand when you say creating screencasts is hard. It took me sometime to get to a point where it takes me just an hour to record a 5min video (can also be read as sarcasm, because I find it hard too).
Joking aside, great app ! I haven't actually started writing such app, but I did consider it; This definitely fills a void. I wish you the best getting more users !
(Also thanks for mentioning it here on HN)
Promotion work is Hard Work. It's also depressing work when nobody notices the post ... or maybe I'm just too needy.
Loved the video, btw. I'm guessing the canvas part is Fabric.js based?
My library's most popular video has 220 views. I was quite proud when it reached 3 figures! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LebxNhVWyOQ&t=31s
I've released projects, but no one gave a damn. If someone could figure out how to monetize on parallel tracks, some idea that I had... well, cool. I couldn't.
This ain't 2000, when you could be just name any service, google to see if it was on the Internet, and just throw it on there to start raking in the big bucks.
Most projects die of disinterest. So, it doesn't matter if you release, or not: it'll die anyway.
To do better, you have to either have marketing, or a product that solves a real market problem.
But that process isn't that easy, and if you weren't intentional from the beginning about this, you're probably not losing much, talking your time to learn something well.
This is not true at all. Almost everything has more than 1 competitor.
Ship what you have.
Though, I can definitely understand that looking at a finished app and thinking "there's still so much to do on mine..." can be so overwhelming.
I can ship a library or a demo or a small stand alone thing but it can be 10x commitment to actually ship a real service. Deciding to actually do the other 90% of the work is a pretty big hurdle for many, me included.
My point was many software engineers see the product in their mind and think "I can build that!" and think that building it is 99% of the work and if they just built it the money will flow. But it turns out building it is only 10% of the work and when the other 90% of the work presents itself the drive to ship disappears.
In the OP's case the people that shipped found a way to get all the parts needed to ship read. The person didn't ship probably just wrote some code and never even considered the other 9 of 10 things that would need to be done to actually ship.
I'm probably thinking of myself to some degree. I made a product. Maybe I didn't have enough confidence to find partners or investors. I piddled with it for about 18 months, had a few public displays, and then at a trade show I saw someone who was serious with basically the same product but unlike me they found investors, hired people, and had a real company. They didn't just make some tech and a demo (what I did).
I'm working on a product in a very crowded space (issue tracking [0]). Shipping is the easy part. The day to day grind to find distribution and drive more and more users to your product, that's the tough bit.
I'd be curious to know if there's interest in such a feature though. We could always resurrect some dead code ;-)
Thanks for the pricing info too. Sounds promising.
Anyway FWIW it's good and not bad that you found a successful competitor doing what you wanted to do. It is not the end of the line rather somebody else has validated the idea for you. The only time you should actually worry is when you can't find one single competing product to what you're building.
BTW as you put it that their app is slow buggy, there seems to be a lot of room for improvement and so it's still not too late and maybe time to outshine your competition and eat/share their lunch.
A quote from Kevin Ashton: "Nothing begins good, but everything good begins. Everything can be revised, erased, or rearranged later. The courage of creation is making bad beginnings.
It is hard to get out of the mindset of just shipping something, because I was raised and taught that first impressions matter.
Perhaps this is typical mind fallacy, but I feel like this is 60%+ of all HN users.
Though, one problem is that you risk over prioritizing client-specific edge cases.
In any case, an idea without action is worthless.
My first job was answering the phone for an early dial-up ISP, and since I claimed to be able to program, one of the two founders (I forget if it was the tech guy or the business guy) suggested that a good project would be some sort of electronic auction/want ad system. I was like, hm, ok, I have no idea how to do that, maybe I will read about electronic auction systems at the university library. Where I got overwhelmed and didn't do anything further.
But in retrospect many years later, they asked me to invent eBay the same year eBay was founded and the internet as we know it was taking off. It's hard to shake the sense that at that moment in history I could conceivably have done it if I simply had no sense of my limits and infinite energy like many successful people. Instead I proved I wasn't cut out for customer service and they laid me off before the company was acquired.
Execution matters, people were working on this idea at least since Dynabook (1972). It is that hard.
Since then, I've actually tried to do a lot of what's considered "best practices". Ironically, none of these techniques (which many thought leaders promote) actually worked for me. It may have worked for them (eg. prelaunch list building, getting influencers to use their app and promote it) but as a relative nobody, I think the rules are different for folks like me. I like to think I need to be scrappier and to simply do things that are counter-trend.
I suspect there's a large contingent of developers making a decent side living who aren't really talking much about things (too busy, family, other hobbies) and what they did to get there. Sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's just doing really dumb (but obvious in hindsight) type of things.
Over the years, I've grown skeptical about a lot of existing indie start up dogma that's been built up over the years.
Half the stuff I would have spent more time on before remain on my list and nobody has asked for.
Meanwhile I spent time adding and adjusting completely different features.
Another related app I created (sort of a companion app)...went in another direction that I wouldn't have predicted.
Things change dramatically in production. It seems obvious at times but how people use an app and what they want "now" is hard to know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6T8mn6LD2E
Of course they did learn a ton.
Don't ship: rocket is lost, nothing is learned.
Ship: rocket is still lost, but a lot is learned.
This holds true for many startups. If you ship, you learn. You may think you know what your customer wants, but until you get it in the hands of users you won't know what features really matter.
>"I learned to "Just Ship it" but I thought "If I build it they will come"
And then it'll be about how putting some code out the door isn't the same thing as launching a product.
Not to mention a lot of markets look like this. Takes a year before they notice you. A year for them to realize you aren't going away. Another year before this buy anything. Another year before they buy in quantity.
Consider those first two years. None of those guys would know your current product is a POS because have haven't bought any yet. And they won't really mind finding rough edges as long as they are convinced they'll fixed.
I have a feeling that in reality there is always a constant stream of new potential customers who will consider your product, and eventually the number of people who reject it and walk away will start to go down.
I gave up on the idea a few months later but kept an eye on the project. It didn't take off the way it was supposed to, and I have a feeling that if I was still working on my version I could have pivoted and taken advantage of what I was learning by watching them faster than they could have (they had so many users etc to support)!
And that was in social - in most other products network effects are nowhere near as powerful e.g. I tried linear.app for a side project even though i actually enjoy using lira at work. Since i have many projects it's easy to try new things on some and drop / change what doesn't work.
I think the "just ship it" oversimplification comes from the fact that getting user feedback is vital for most products. It doesn't mean that launching first is the goal though. The product I'm working on now is in a super crowded space (landing page creation) but it has an edge over others for a particular type of market (developers who don't want to mess around with UI, drag and drop etc but still want beauty and control) and even though the product is "ready" im not "just ship it"-ing because I'm busy "talking to users".
For me, "just ship it" is a totally wrong advice to give, in the same way as "we will ship is when is ready"(and never is ready).
You have to plan ahead, know your limitations and say NO to adding things you can not complete on time. And you have to plan for things that look simple being much harder to implement in practice.
You need discipline for saying no, and it is not as funny as just trying new things all the time(new languages, new platforms, new methodologies, new projects). But you are an adult, not a kid, you should be able to control yourself(and most people can't BTW, they drink coffee and smoke because they need external controls instead of internal).
You should try new things, but not too much. It takes time for being efficient and master something. There are diminishing returns too but productivity while learning something new is almost zero compared with the master.
How much is too much? It depends on your specific job.
I recommend people to write down and document the actual real work that something takes on calendars and their expectations.
Over a period of time, you will be able to compare your expectations to your actual work in detail. You will surprise yourself where you spend most of your time.
Then you will be able to take decisions and say NO to those areas that take most of your time and give you back little on future projects.
but it's also likely not to care
Even the established players in a field get complacent or too large to move quickly to address an emerging need and leave themselves open to disruption.
An important part of being a founder is learning from experiences that don’t go as planned. It seems like the author has a really good attitude about this.
If you're burning through your own money to bootstrap something, wrong/bad decisions made early can cost so much time and money it makes it unfeasible to continue. If you're burning investors money, it's less devastating personally and you can afford that expensive learning.
Then HUGE COMPANY X released the exact same product but 50x further along and we could never compete.
We all walked away feeling like shit, with a lot of money and time down the drain, and our tail between our legs. Most of us on the team haven't spoken since and it's been about 12 years.
Now-days I work on projects where competition doesn't really matter. There's a lot of other people doing the same thing, but we're all a little different, and just different enough that everyone who likes these types of products buys them all if they're good.
Either way, it's a monumetally stupid position - just about everything ever sold has been massively improved by customer feedback.
It's also a lot easier to improve a product I use than one I'm just running locally. It also gives the website some time to rank in the search engines.
For the author, yes, perhaps. He appears to have a sufficiently large following to help with this.
For the rest of us, finding a way to reach an audience willing to pay will likely remain the biggest problem.
Which is not to underestimate the discipline required to just ship it. Everything the author said still applies there.
In that time, I had plans and started an app and decided to leave it for too long thinking now one would like it. Then that sailing game was on the front page of HN, that's almost exactly what I was working on.
I also have a pet project in development about making a google sheet more presentable for users, does that sound familiar to anyone else? Yeh also on the front page recently, not mine though.
I just keep telling myself, ideas are cheap and don't get bummed out by it. Good job everyone else executing. I'll still make some of them anyway.
Once my product is close to parity with the basic competitor offerings (i.e. copying 1-2 features and ignoring the rest), I'll market it and I'm hoping that my automation level will give me a massive margin that allows me to operate at a lower scale and still churn out a decent amount of net profit each month.
That's why when I hear stories about "being perfectionists" or "you have to use X technology, because X is perfect/everybody uses it/it's 'best practice' and the rest are second-class" I get skeptical
Facebook still uses PHP. PHP! Can you imagine if Mark had stopped to rewrite the thing in, I don't know, Scala because PHP sucks (well, it does, but it works)?
Aim for money in the bank.
Ship it, ship it
Ship it, ship it
Merge into master and release it
Add some more features, fix some more bugs
it doesn't matter if it don't compiles
Just ship it (just ship it, whoo!)
I remember a manager I worked with, once wrote on a whiteboard at our first project meeting:
”The #1 Feature is SHIP.”
That project was a difficult and ambitious one, with a huge amount of tension between over-structuring and over-featuring, but it did result in a shipping product that was quite good, and lasted for a number of years. It’s been decommissioned for years, but still runs today. My wife still uses it, and dreads when it will finally die.
The first version wasn’t what we wanted, but it grew into something a lot better.
I also worked on a project that was killed just before it was to ship, because it couldn’t meet spec, with all that “between done and ship” stuff.
To this day, I don’t know if we made the right decision, by doing that. I have never encountered any software that does what it did, anywhere near as well as it did.
Wasn’t my decision. I would have shipped it. I think it would have revolutionized the workflow, and set a high bar for everyone else.
In my experience, there’s a huge amount of work that has to happen, between when we declare it “done,” and when it’s ready to ship. It’s important to plan for it.
It’s quite possible to overplan, but, in my experience, it’s a lot more common to underplan.
Here’s a metaphor that I use[0]:
Shipping is boring.
Ever watch a building go up? A good prefab looks complete after three months, but doesn’t open for another nine months. It looks awesome and shiny, but is still behind a rent-a-fence. What gives?
That’s because all that interior work; the finish carpentry, the drywall, the painting, etc., take _forever_, and these are the parts of the building that see everyday use, so they need to be absolutely spot-on. The outside is mostly a pigeon toilet. It doesn’t need to be as complete; a solid frame and watertight is sufficient. They just needed it to keep the rain out, while the really skilled craftspeople got their jobs done.
I like to make stuff polished, tested and complete. I don’t like making pigeon toilets.
But that’s just me. YMMV.
I created filament even when my tolerance was slightly off, I managed to label it +/-0.03mm and sell it in market even with limited colour choice
Stay humble homie.