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It's linked in the RethinkDB essay, but it's always worth explicitly calling out the "Worse Is Better" essay: http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html ht
by harryh 9y ago
It's linked in the RethinkDB essay, but it's always worth explicitly calling out the "Worse Is Better" essay:
http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
Ignore its lessons at your peril.
Your job isn't to build an engineering masterpiece. Your job, as pg says, is to build something people want.
- btilly 9y agoI agree with the lessons in Worse Is Better, but I don't think that the author properly understood what he was observing. The result was a confused and confusing essay. The way that I understand it is that what is "Good" depends on how you measure it. When we measure in terms of technical quality, we get one answer. When we measure in terms of suited to be widely adopted, we get a different answer. We tend to idealize for technical quality, but popularity is what matters more. And once something is widely enough adopted, the technical inferiority tends to be fixable.
- pweissbrod 9y agoShipping early and working on stability later may work for something like a video game but not for a database my system depends on thanks