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Engineers love engineering, they love their own engineering when it comes to open source/free time projects, and they tend to not like the legwork of publishing

by prox 3y ago

Engineers love engineering, they love their own engineering when it comes to open source/free time projects, and they tend to not like the legwork of publishing, polishing and making it ready for public consumption. (Which is a lot of work on its own) Engineers and QA/useability/marketing people tend not to mingle in these projects. I am broken record at this point, but Blender and Godot tackled this problem. Take sandstorm, it looks like a informative website but just looking at it I see a ton of friction installing it. Whether or not that is true, but the optics are against it.

orblivion 3y ago
That's a useful bit of feedback. Indeed I would actually say that installation is quite simple as such things go. And maintenance is dead simple, it updates itself in the background.
kentonv 3y ago
Sandstorm was actually a startup with product and marketing and we did spend a lot of time trying to make it as simple as possible to install. The only way to make Sandstorm easier to set up would be to partner with hosting providers to offer one-click installers. In the absence of that, Sandstorm's current install is about as easy as it could possibly be given the constraint of "should run on a generic Linux host". (Aside: People have always given Linux flak for being hard to install. But have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch? It's sooooo much harder. But no one cares because it's preinstalled on every PC you buy.) (Aside 2: How did Chrome become the most popular browser? Sure as hell not because it's so easy for people to install. Most people don't know what a browser is. It got there by Google paying a lot of people to bundle it. It's honestly amazing that Google pulled it off, against competitors who owned their respective operating systems.) Anyway, back in the day, Sandstorm actually offered its own hosting service, which you didn't need to be technical to sign up for. So it was actually quite easy then. But it was a first-party service. In retrospect I think building the first-party service was a mistake. It distracted too much engineering time away from actually building out the platform and ecosystem. It meant we could offer a better price point than a VPS provider would, but I think the people actually interested in the product at that point weren't so price-conscious. If I did it again I'd focus on partnerships.

by prox 3y ago

orblivion 3y ago

That's a useful bit of feedback. Indeed I would actually say that installation is quite simple as such things go. And maintenance is dead simple, it updates itself in the background.

kentonv 3y ago

Sandstorm was actually a startup with product and marketing and we did spend a lot of time trying to make it as simple as possible to install. The only way to make Sandstorm easier to set up would be to partner with hosting providers to offer one-click installers. In the absence of that, Sandstorm's current install is about as easy as it could possibly be given the constraint of "should run on a generic Linux host". (Aside: People have always given Linux flak for being hard to install. But have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch? It's sooooo much harder. But no one cares because it's preinstalled on every PC you buy.) (Aside 2: How did Chrome become the most popular browser? Sure as hell not because it's so easy for people to install. Most people don't know what a browser is. It got there by Google paying a lot of people to bundle it. It's honestly amazing that Google pulled it off, against competitors who owned their respective operating systems.) Anyway, back in the day, Sandstorm actually offered its own hosting service, which you didn't need to be technical to sign up for. So it was actually quite easy then. But it was a first-party service. In retrospect I think building the first-party service was a mistake. It distracted too much engineering time away from actually building out the platform and ecosystem. It meant we could offer a better price point than a VPS provider would, but I think the people actually interested in the product at that point weren't so price-conscious. If I did it again I'd focus on partnerships.