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I had that realization when I emailed the creators of Erlang [1]. In my mind they were like these rockstars and I was some plebe groveling at their feet, so I

I had that realization when I emailed the creators of Erlang [1]. In my mind they were like these rockstars and I was some plebe groveling at their feet, so I was amazed when they replied back extremely politely, fairly quickly no less. It made me realize that fundamentally these are just people, people generally are helpful and nice, and they also like hearing positive things said about them. It was a good lesson to learn at a fairly young age. [1] To be clear I was extremely polite, no criticism was tossed their way!

drbawb 2y ago
I remember e-mailing a guy for some iPad app and having a similar moment. The important context is the app had its own custom keyboard. I used the app personally, and recommended it to a customer to solve a problem they were having. It turned out that the newest version would not work because it had removed some of the Fn-keys. I e-mailed the developer to ask for some guidance. At the time I figured it maybe had something to do with the viewport size, and was just trying to diagnose the issue. (I had an iPad mini, while the customer had purchased I think a 9th gen iPad. I wanted to know if a different device would solve the problem.) The guy e-mailed me back and was like "Oh, yeah, I changed that last week while making the new keyboard layout. I'll revert it and push out a new build." - I had a similar epiphany at that point where it was like "this guy is a dev just trying to navigate tradeoffs and ship the best app he can." - Also the tradeoffs are never as straightforward as one would think.[1] [1]: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- tombert 2y ago
  > this guy is a dev just trying to navigate tradeoffs and ship the best app he can I suspect a lot (most?) of apps in the App Store and the Play Store fall into this category, just like most repos on Github. People are putting their projects out there; obviously they're not immune to criticism, but I think it's important to remember that most of these people aren't Tim Cook, they're not making a living promoting stuff and taking shit people throw, they're just engineers sharing code with the world. > Also the tradeoffs are never as straightforward as one would think. Yep, completely agree; the obvious "solution" is to make everything configurable, and that can work to some extent, but then you risk an "oops I reinvented interpreters" moment, and then you made the app impossible to use for non-geeks. There's almost never a "correct" way to do it to satisfy everyone.

drbawb 2y ago

I remember e-mailing a guy for some iPad app and having a similar moment. The important context is the app had its own custom keyboard. I used the app personally, and recommended it to a customer to solve a problem they were having. It turned out that the newest version would not work because it had removed some of the Fn-keys. I e-mailed the developer to ask for some guidance. At the time I figured it maybe had something to do with the viewport size, and was just trying to diagnose the issue. (I had an iPad mini, while the customer had purchased I think a 9th gen iPad. I wanted to know if a different device would solve the problem.) The guy e-mailed me back and was like "Oh, yeah, I changed that last week while making the new keyboard layout. I'll revert it and push out a new build." - I had a similar epiphany at that point where it was like "this guy is a dev just trying to navigate tradeoffs and ship the best app he can." - Also the tradeoffs are never as straightforward as one would think.[1] [1]: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

tombert 2y ago
> this guy is a dev just trying to navigate tradeoffs and ship the best app he can I suspect a lot (most?) of apps in the App Store and the Play Store fall into this category, just like most repos on Github. People are putting their projects out there; obviously they're not immune to criticism, but I think it's important to remember that most of these people aren't Tim Cook, they're not making a living promoting stuff and taking shit people throw, they're just engineers sharing code with the world. > Also the tradeoffs are never as straightforward as one would think. Yep, completely agree; the obvious "solution" is to make everything configurable, and that can work to some extent, but then you risk an "oops I reinvented interpreters" moment, and then you made the app impossible to use for non-geeks. There's almost never a "correct" way to do it to satisfy everyone.