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it_citizen

In B2B, don't build user preferences UI. Configure things for your user directly in the DB.

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DB? More like a JSON file. If you wanna get fancy make it a remote file so the server doesn't need to be restarted.

JSON file? More like hard coded conditionals in the code.

Code? I hand-craft every HTTP response myself

Cute. I personally deliver IP packets directly to the customers' front router.

While you're doing that like a remote corporate asshole, I'm in the room speed sketching screen refreshes for them so they don't need to even waste power on running a computer.

I walk to each customer site and use telnet for the HTTP requests.

JSON documents can easily live in the DB ;)

You're not looking at it right. The JSON document is your DB. Wanna add another client config? Your client manager makes a PR with the changes and your CI deploys it with the server binary. Easy peasy no-code solution.

If you have CI, that's still over-engineered for a pre-mvp product.

Just kidding... partially

I think CI is actually one that you should do when you write your first few lines of code. GitHub actions is free, comes with one click templates, so use it.

You should have an internal UI around it. This should take all of a couple minutes... if this takes longer than that then you have other problems and adding any features at all is probably taking forever.

not having a preferences UI isn't just about the time to build the UI, it's about control, QA, and feedback. If your customer has to communicate with you to get a feature enabled, it gives you a chance to talk to your customer and get a sense of what they need the feature for, if it will work for their use case or the data they're working with, or if there's better features to offer them instead to solve their problem. it avoids the issue where customers randomly click buttons to see what happens, and then get disappointed when the thing they imagined might happen isn't what actually happens. And it makes them feel special because you've turned something on just for them.

by all means, build a UI. but click the checkboxes yourself.

Yes - it should be an internal thing for people on the front line, because you're likely going to be turning on features and stuff.

A simple graphical DB client is often a perfectly fine UI. Everything depends on the details, of course.

If this saves a month of defining and building a bunch of admin preference screens, letting you focus your one developer on things that matter, that can mean everything for a small startup.

what??? a month??? for an internal preferences/flags UI? See, this is what I mean. You've already failed. You cannot execute.

Also now you're gonna make customer support folks edit the DB?

- With Django, this is generated for you. It's literally free.

- With DotNet Core, also can be generated.

- Pretty sure Spring MVC has something similar.

- With Rails - can also be generated, or built very quickly with Hotwire.

- With React, this takes a couple minutes. Just have a generic "flags" list you can toggle etc. There are like a million form generation libraries.

At the end of the day if it takes you a week to get a UI with a list of buttons and checkboxes out, you need to rethink the technologies and process you're using if you're trying to move fast. You should probably do away with the process, too, for this early of an organization.

> Also now you're gonna make customer support folks edit the DB?

The founders aren't regular customer support folks.

Yeah probably. If it's just one guy then... maybe. Personally I found putting 5mins into a little UI with text inputs useful when a customer in another timezone reaches out at 11pm and I just have my phone - can get that five star review by just making the adjustment right then.

For Spring I find https://bootify.io does a great job of generating DB, models, CRUD frontend+backend. Not open source but the basic variant is free (and I mean really free to use, no registration, just use it) and the code generated is reasonable for further development.

I like your vibe. Execution > Idea.

It's def true for so many startups that they are really really slow in execution.

You need to find developes that execute and not talk about 2 hours in a retrospective about clean code.

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