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I don't know how to react to this. It seems like the author trivializes the task to prove a point. It is never just a 'category'. Wrapped up in that is a whole

I don't know how to react to this. It seems like the author trivializes the task to prove a point. It is never just a 'category'. Wrapped up in that is a whole bunch of functionality and expectations that always differ between projects. For example users want to search by, edit, manage and delete categories. Who should have permission to change them and edit them? How should they be shown in the UI, are they clickable, do they have perma-links? What category should old posts be given. How do you want to represent "no-category" state. Do we need to support multiple categories? What other side-effects happen when a category changes. Unless all product managers get in a room and define the canonical implementation of all web app features i think we are destined to do a lot more plumbing for a long time to come.

lovasoa 3y ago
That is a good point. And that's why developing a new feature in, say, facebook, will always take a lot of efforts. But when you are a team of 3 with a startup to launch, for instance, you don't really care about permissions to edit categories and the no-category state. You just want that line of text at the top of the post that says which category it belongs to. And you want to do it in a way that will allow you to later easily come back to it and start thinking about the "no-category" state and multiple categories for a single post.
fragmede 3y ago
Problem is, even if you could get every single product manager in a room to hash it all out, three years down the line, when half of them have changed companies, and there is a whole new batch of them; when the business needs have evolved so that there are now two types of wholly orthogonal "categories" tags for every post that have their own separate management systems, and the product managers can't even agree on their functionality and expectations, what then? Job security for one, but it's hard to say in the abstract which coding style will be better.

lovasoa 3y ago

That is a good point. And that's why developing a new feature in, say, facebook, will always take a lot of efforts. But when you are a team of 3 with a startup to launch, for instance, you don't really care about permissions to edit categories and the no-category state. You just want that line of text at the top of the post that says which category it belongs to. And you want to do it in a way that will allow you to later easily come back to it and start thinking about the "no-category" state and multiple categories for a single post.

fragmede 3y ago

Problem is, even if you could get every single product manager in a room to hash it all out, three years down the line, when half of them have changed companies, and there is a whole new batch of them; when the business needs have evolved so that there are now two types of wholly orthogonal "categories" tags for every post that have their own separate management systems, and the product managers can't even agree on their functionality and expectations, what then? Job security for one, but it's hard to say in the abstract which coding style will be better.