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There's an important realisation as a developer, or in fact as anyone whose work affects other people. Consider a bug or badly created feature that costs users
by vintagedave 9y ago
There's an important realisation as a developer, or in fact as anyone whose work affects other people. Consider a bug or badly created feature that costs users ten seconds of their time. Let's assume a hundred thousand users, encountering that once a day, for a year. That's 4200 man-hours lost per year.
Is it user-focused to allow that bug to remain? How do you judge the importance of your users' time?
Slack - often Electron-based apps in general - are fast for the developers to create, but cause problems for the users. There are many more users than developers, and a good question is, is the value of users' time and money less than the developers, or the user's resources (such as memory) the developers' to freely use? Developers can't write their whole app in assembly, but at what point do the problems their choice of technology cause for users overbalance a reasonable standard of consideration for their users and user experience? An app with the problems Slack has is one that has largely prioritised the developer's time and resources over their users.
So your "real developers" comment is a straw man ;) But you're close, I think: better is to consider the balance of value developers ascribe to themselves vs their users and what use of Electron, and app behaviour like this, says.
- pspeter3 9y agoShouldn't this trade off be born by the market? If Electron is such a problem for Slack, users should be switching away to better engineered alternatives.
- vintagedave 9y agoJust because Slack is useful enough people use it, doesn't meant the tradeoff they've made when developing indicates a high regard for their users' machines or experience.
- pspeter3 9y agoThat's fair. I wonder if users actually care in practice.
- vintagedave 9y agoThe other side to the market question is that this tradeoff may be why they're big in the market - because it allowed them to get to market quickly. So they made the trade-off knowingly, and for a reason that makes sense. The question then becomes, once established, do they improve the app?
- pspeter3 9y agoYeah, I think that's a key question as well.
- blep-arsh 9y agoI'm seeing lots of people around me just giving up on Slack and switching to Telegram. It's not a shining example of good engineering, but it's still noticeably leaner and faster.
- pspeter3 9y agoI haven't used Telegram in a professional setting but seems like a good solution. I'm hoping Matrix/Riot takes off and the open protocol enables a native experience.
- rco8786 9y agoThis is literally the same argument people were making when the JVM came out.
- vintagedave 9y agoBut is it a true argument or a false argument? That's what matters.
- rco8786 9y agoWhat matters is that it's an argument against progress. It's an argument of good vs perfect.