3 ms·

So Long, Carbonmade: A feature from conception to completion in one day.

43 points by sahillavingia 16y ago

steveklabnik 16y ago
It's nice to see stories like this, that walk you through the entire process, even if it's a simple feature. This is pretty much the essence of agile development, but without the ceremony.
- lukev 16y ago
  With a small team, on a startup where you write your own requirements, agile is so easy it's impossible not to do.
markbao 16y ago
It's interesting to see the move from "we can obviously implement a feature in a day... probably in an hour" to "impressive to introduce a rather basic feature but with introspection" — not a bad thing, since while it seems like the startups are moving slower, the features are being considered with greater gravity than "shoot, let's just code it and deploy"
zzzmarcus 16y ago
When I saw the title of the blog post I thought CarbonMade was shutting down. Took a few paragraphs to be sure they weren't. If you haven't read it, they are't. They just added a feature to ask why people are leaving when they close their accounts.
- spencerfry 16y ago
  Yup. Not shutting down. :) That's just the verbiage we're using here: http://carbonmade.com/goodbye http://carbonmade.com/goodbye That's what the article is referencing.
- kmfrk 16y ago
  I'm sure the ambiguity isn't accidental. Linkbaiting is kinda tedious.
StavrosK 16y ago
I'm not entirely sure that implementing a textbox form in a day is something to brag about. For comparison, yesterday we added some vital statistics for historious to the backend (churn, active users, repeat users, etc etc) with graphs and all in a few hours... It's great when you're a small startup and you can go "hey, we need a form so people can give us feedback when they cancel" and then have it ready in a few minutes, but I don't see it as something extraordinary. What customers do appreciate, though, is when they send you an email about some small feature request or bug report and you reply 5 minutes later saying "thanks for catching that, we just fixed it and it's live". People aren't very used to getting bugs fixed just by reporting them, and we get some very happy customers this way.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  Let's not be in a hurry to post a contradictory opinion; let's try to understand what an article is really about and what it's trying to say -- I don't see how anything other than the most cursory reading of this article could lead you to the conclusion that it was "bragging about implementing a textbox form in a day". Paragraph 1: The introduction; Spencer introduces the topic of the article (note that "text box" isn't anywhere in this), and why he found it to be important. Paragraph 2: Spencer introduces another, secondary topic, where he explains a common issue encountered by small-but-growing development teams. Paragraph 3: Spencer explains his approach to handling part of the problems explained in the previous paragraph. He isn't fully resolving all of the problems associated with project management, but he's found a particular way of handling one aspect of it, and he's sharing that with us. Paragraph 4(ish): He ties the approach outlined in the previous paragraph into the problem introduced in the first paragraph. Incidentally, this is rarer in the navel-gazing blogger set: he's introduced two topics of conversation and tied them together in just 4 short paragraphs. Good stuff! Paragraphs 5 & 6 start the next section of the article with some exposition. Eh, OK. Paragraph 7 is meaty, and explains why they concluded that a standard selection-type survey wasn't what they wanted. Paragraph 8 concludes this section with an explanation of their choice of targets for the exit survey. The end section here has a little more exposition, in the "author is hanging out with you" format, along with some examples of early data which support his supposition way back in the first paragraph that mining the data would be valuable. So ... this isn't about implementing a textbox form in a day. -- On another note, this sort of thing is a large part of why I personally don't bother keeping a regular blog. Why the hell should I spend any time writing something that people are going to piss on without even properly reading it? Online forums are bad enough, attracting an audience of half-interested know-it-alls doesn't sound like a fun time.
mstevens 16y ago
Interestingly spencerfry.com seems to be blocked by OpenDNS as "Proxy/anonymizer". I've experimentally flagged it for review.

43 points by sahillavingia 16y ago

It's nice to see stories like this, that walk you through the entire process, even if it's a simple feature. This is pretty much the essence of agile development, but without the ceremony.

lukev 16y ago
With a small team, on a startup where you write your own requirements, agile is so easy it's impossible not to do.

markbao 16y ago

It's interesting to see the move from "we can obviously implement a feature in a day... probably in an hour" to "impressive to introduce a rather basic feature but with introspection" — not a bad thing, since while it seems like the startups are moving slower, the features are being considered with greater gravity than "shoot, let's just code it and deploy"

zzzmarcus 16y ago

When I saw the title of the blog post I thought CarbonMade was shutting down. Took a few paragraphs to be sure they weren't. If you haven't read it, they are't. They just added a feature to ask why people are leaving when they close their accounts.

spencerfry 16y ago
Yup. Not shutting down. :) That's just the verbiage we're using here: http://carbonmade.com/goodbye http://carbonmade.com/goodbye That's what the article is referencing.
kmfrk 16y ago
I'm sure the ambiguity isn't accidental. Linkbaiting is kinda tedious.

StavrosK 16y ago

I'm not entirely sure that implementing a textbox form in a day is something to brag about. For comparison, yesterday we added some vital statistics for historious to the backend (churn, active users, repeat users, etc etc) with graphs and all in a few hours... It's great when you're a small startup and you can go "hey, we need a form so people can give us feedback when they cancel" and then have it ready in a few minutes, but I don't see it as something extraordinary. What customers do appreciate, though, is when they send you an email about some small feature request or bug report and you reply 5 minutes later saying "thanks for catching that, we just fixed it and it's live". People aren't very used to getting bugs fixed just by reporting them, and we get some very happy customers this way.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
thaumaturgy 16y ago
Let's not be in a hurry to post a contradictory opinion; let's try to understand what an article is really about and what it's trying to say -- I don't see how anything other than the most cursory reading of this article could lead you to the conclusion that it was "bragging about implementing a textbox form in a day". Paragraph 1: The introduction; Spencer introduces the topic of the article (note that "text box" isn't anywhere in this), and why he found it to be important. Paragraph 2: Spencer introduces another, secondary topic, where he explains a common issue encountered by small-but-growing development teams. Paragraph 3: Spencer explains his approach to handling part of the problems explained in the previous paragraph. He isn't fully resolving all of the problems associated with project management, but he's found a particular way of handling one aspect of it, and he's sharing that with us. Paragraph 4(ish): He ties the approach outlined in the previous paragraph into the problem introduced in the first paragraph. Incidentally, this is rarer in the navel-gazing blogger set: he's introduced two topics of conversation and tied them together in just 4 short paragraphs. Good stuff! Paragraphs 5 & 6 start the next section of the article with some exposition. Eh, OK. Paragraph 7 is meaty, and explains why they concluded that a standard selection-type survey wasn't what they wanted. Paragraph 8 concludes this section with an explanation of their choice of targets for the exit survey. The end section here has a little more exposition, in the "author is hanging out with you" format, along with some examples of early data which support his supposition way back in the first paragraph that mining the data would be valuable. So ... this isn't about implementing a textbox form in a day. -- On another note, this sort of thing is a large part of why I personally don't bother keeping a regular blog. Why the hell should I spend any time writing something that people are going to piss on without even properly reading it? Online forums are bad enough, attracting an audience of half-interested know-it-alls doesn't sound like a fun time.

mstevens 16y ago

Interestingly spencerfry.com seems to be blocked by OpenDNS as "Proxy/anonymizer". I've experimentally flagged it for review.