5 ms·

Funny to see this on the same front page as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795064 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795064. "[Jobs] pushed Steve Wozni

by zeteo 15y ago

Funny to see this on the same front page as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795064 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795064. "[Jobs] pushed Steve Wozniak to create a game called Breakout. Woz said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Woz knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it."

joe_the_user 15y ago
Yeah and Linus coded git in a weekend... The infuriating thing for me is that people don't get that these monumentally fast development achievements still involved a massive expenditure of personal effort. Thus the "It'll take a few days of coding" customers of the gp are only more annoying if they cite examples like yours, expecting a complete product in a few days.
- zeteo 15y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I'm a software engineer.
- bigiain 15y ago
  Not only that, but they require all the skill and experience of truly world-class experts in their fields. Yes, Linus can throw together an amazing dvcs that scratches his particular current itch in a weekend. The just-graduated CS major you're pitching your idea to? The one with three whole php and/or ruby websites under his belt? He'll be able to do that too - after spending 20 years running the worlds most popular open source project and knowing exactly what he needs his version control system to do. Give him a weekend to do it right now? You'll get _something_, but it sure as hell wont be git. Same with Woz - there was probably nobody else on the planet who could have written breakout for the AppleII in under a month. I don't know whether Jobs was brilliant enough to know what he was asking was possible for Woz, even when Woz told him it wasn't, or whether Jobs just strongarmed Woz with unrealistic expectations and took credit for the success (and laid blame for any failure); but if he'd asked anybody else, they would have failed. Whatever your idea is, chances are _very_ high that if you think it could be coded "in a few days", you don't actually understand the problem (and it's solution) yourself.
  - kamaal 15y ago
    I can/have built in some amazing stuff over weekends. But generally the requirements for that are, and in no specific order. 1. I must be in a flow. 2. I am using a technology very familar, so I know the tools and many things. 3. I am doing something new. Not maintaining some ones code or interacting with an external team. 4. No disturbances and other office distractions like office emails. Building new things are different than maintaining. Many a times I'm waiting for some other team's inputs to proceed. Or I'm required to fix a list of X number of bugs which can't be fixed until I understand the underlying code base well. Create this webpage in 15 mins kind of arguments don't work because you are adding something into a working system and you can't generally do so until you understand everything about the system. Doing something new is different. You definitely can get to the first prototype if you know what you are doing, what you are using to do it and no distractions.
    - keithpeter 15y ago
      Mark Bernstein is recoding a program called StorySpace which dates from 1980s?. He is blogging about it. Day 6 will give a flavour http://www.markbernstein.org/Mar12/Day6.html http://www.markbernstein.org/Mar12/Day6.html He is working on a familiar design, and knows the old code. He is recoding in newer tools.
      - kamaal 15y ago
        Look Mate, By no means Am I downplaying anybody's accomplishments nor am I trying to say that anything can be built quickly. Rome was not built in a day. Neither was Git as we know now. But given a narrow set of requirements you can get a prototype out pretty quickly. Especially today when so many reusable things are available. Linus coded up a distributed vcs(Not with all the feature we know now today) sufficient enough to host itself on a weekend. Its also depends on the Individual. Some people can sit for long hours at a stretch and focus on problems till something worthwhile comes out. Others can only do little per day. In this case it looks like a rewrite and rewrites are by no means doing something new. By now he would have had a perfect idea of what he needs to do in the entirety so he would be writing per that design one thing at a time. That is totally different that writing a self hosted vcs from scratch on weekend and then iterating and adding features over years.

by zeteo 15y ago

joe_the_user 15y ago

Yeah and Linus coded git in a weekend... The infuriating thing for me is that people don't get that these monumentally fast development achievements still involved a massive expenditure of personal effort. Thus the "It'll take a few days of coding" customers of the gp are only more annoying if they cite examples like yours, expecting a complete product in a few days.

zeteo 15y ago
Don't get me wrong, I'm a software engineer.
bigiain 15y ago
Not only that, but they require all the skill and experience of truly world-class experts in their fields. Yes, Linus can throw together an amazing dvcs that scratches his particular current itch in a weekend. The just-graduated CS major you're pitching your idea to? The one with three whole php and/or ruby websites under his belt? He'll be able to do that too - after spending 20 years running the worlds most popular open source project and knowing exactly what he needs his version control system to do. Give him a weekend to do it right now? You'll get _something_, but it sure as hell wont be git. Same with Woz - there was probably nobody else on the planet who could have written breakout for the AppleII in under a month. I don't know whether Jobs was brilliant enough to know what he was asking was possible for Woz, even when Woz told him it wasn't, or whether Jobs just strongarmed Woz with unrealistic expectations and took credit for the success (and laid blame for any failure); but if he'd asked anybody else, they would have failed. Whatever your idea is, chances are _very_ high that if you think it could be coded "in a few days", you don't actually understand the problem (and it's solution) yourself.
- kamaal 15y ago
  I can/have built in some amazing stuff over weekends. But generally the requirements for that are, and in no specific order. 1. I must be in a flow. 2. I am using a technology very familar, so I know the tools and many things. 3. I am doing something new. Not maintaining some ones code or interacting with an external team. 4. No disturbances and other office distractions like office emails. Building new things are different than maintaining. Many a times I'm waiting for some other team's inputs to proceed. Or I'm required to fix a list of X number of bugs which can't be fixed until I understand the underlying code base well. Create this webpage in 15 mins kind of arguments don't work because you are adding something into a working system and you can't generally do so until you understand everything about the system. Doing something new is different. You definitely can get to the first prototype if you know what you are doing, what you are using to do it and no distractions.
  - keithpeter 15y ago
    Mark Bernstein is recoding a program called StorySpace which dates from 1980s?. He is blogging about it. Day 6 will give a flavour http://www.markbernstein.org/Mar12/Day6.html http://www.markbernstein.org/Mar12/Day6.html He is working on a familiar design, and knows the old code. He is recoding in newer tools.
    - kamaal 15y ago
      Look Mate, By no means Am I downplaying anybody's accomplishments nor am I trying to say that anything can be built quickly. Rome was not built in a day. Neither was Git as we know now. But given a narrow set of requirements you can get a prototype out pretty quickly. Especially today when so many reusable things are available. Linus coded up a distributed vcs(Not with all the feature we know now today) sufficient enough to host itself on a weekend. Its also depends on the Individual. Some people can sit for long hours at a stretch and focus on problems till something worthwhile comes out. Others can only do little per day. In this case it looks like a rewrite and rewrites are by no means doing something new. By now he would have had a perfect idea of what he needs to do in the entirety so he would be writing per that design one thing at a time. That is totally different that writing a self hosted vcs from scratch on weekend and then iterating and adding features over years.