24 ms·

Things You Should Shout at Brilliant Web Developers

52 points by jot 13y ago

casual_slacker 13y ago
Great post. I think a similar issue is when an engineer feels they need a certain set of infrastructure or algorithmic features before they can start building their program. If you end up finding out that most potential users have a different problem though it can all be for waste. I've met many programmers who seem to have forgotten (or never learned) how to prototype, and can't imagine building something with a fundamental security or scalability flaw. There's also a far more difficult one to become aware of, which is building an overly complex solution when a simpler one exists for the problem.
- jot 13y ago
  Very true. It's not just in the name of 'design' and 'user experience' perfection that developers overly delay their first product.
- mikeash 13y ago
  I can see passing on scalability, but security? In what circumstances does it make sense to build something with a fundamental security flaw? Getting security right doesn't have to take significantly more time than getting it wrong.
pdog 13y ago
Why is this specific to web developers? All ten things are applicable to anyone selling a product.
- jot 13y ago
  It doesn't have to be. That said if I made it more abstract the result would likely be less web developers reading it. I've met more web developers that need to hear these things (probably because I spend more time with them than other people building products).
  - pdog 13y ago
    Thanks. I just thought people other than web developers should read it too. It's a great list of thought-provoking questions we should all ask of ourselves.
    - jot 13y ago
      Very happy to hear that. Please feel free to re-write/copy chunks of it for another audience, all I ask is that you link back to it :)
- nine_k 13y ago
  Someone shipping a physical product does not have the luxury to ship a half-baked, bare-bones first version and upgrade it in 6 months for every customer with a click of a button.
jakobe 13y ago
> How dare you assume that your competitors have the time and skill to copy you. Unfortunately your competitors don't need your skills to copy you; once you make your thing public, everybody will see how to do it and copying your product becomes trivial. But the good part is that only successful projects are copied, so you really shouldn't worry about it -- when people start copying you, it means you are on the right track.
- jot 13y ago
  Have you ever worked on a rebuild? Copying is surprisingly hard, almost never trivial. Check out how bad Rocket Internet's products are compared to the services they copy. They are pros at copying and still they can't get it right. People copy when they know it's worth the risk. That's why successful projects are copied. I agree with you that it is a very good indicator that you are on the right track. :)
  - hnriot 13y ago
    Sometimes this is true, but many products are trivial to copy, like Instagram, or twitter. Most of us here could probably copy either of those in a weekend or two.
    - ZoF 13y ago
      Copy basic functionality perhaps.... I doubt the majority here could scale nearly as effectively as both of those companies have....
      - mikeash 13y ago
        I don't know. Scaling as effectively as Twitter doesn't seem like a particularly high bar. They spent a year or so after they got big being down almost as much as they were up. The "fail whale" was just about the most common thing to see on twitter.com. Of course, now that Twitter is established, you cannot repeat their mistakes if you want to succeed.
readme 13y ago
>When you spend weeks or months perfecting your product in the name of 'user experience' or 'design' before selling it, you are doing more harm than good for your users and yourself on your quest to be financially independent Some of us are serious about delivering quality. You are trivializing 2/3 of the web application right there. If it looks like shit and confuses people, no one is going to use it, unless it meets a serious pain point and has absolutely no competition yet, which, is not the case for most of us.
- williamcotton 13y ago
  What if it turns out that most people are building the wrong products?
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Sometimes the wrong product is a low quality product that does X and the right product might be a high quality product that does X.
    - jot 13y ago
      Today there is a great market for aluminium and glass mobile phones. I wouldn't recommend going into that market if you have limited financial resources. If the first, second or third developer of mobile phones made them out of aluminium and glass rather than plastic do you think they would have been more successful? How about if they gave them away for nothing, or with a total return less than cost price? If you want quality to be your differentiator, you need to already have easy access to a proven market for your core product.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        This applies if you are building a product which is so groundbreakingly new that nobody has any expectations for quality level yet. These products are very rare compared to those which are an evolution of an existing concept. Even with other differentiating factors you are going to struggle to sell a product which has a perception of being below par in terms of quality.
gweinberg 13y ago
It took me a while to convince myself that this wasn't a joke. Obviously, nobody wants to ship a crappy product, and obviously if you insist on perfection your product will never ship. Deciding when a product is "good enough" is a judgement call. Shouting "how dare you" at people who disagree on this judgement call is just stupid.
- jot 13y ago
  I probably failed to set the context. :) I felt an extreme position was needed to respond to brilliant but highly principled people (who I wished were joking) but I felt were saying things like: "How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that won't work with JavaScript turned off." "How dare you suggest that I would charge for something that doesn't even have feature X." "How dare you suggest that I would ever let a design loose that I hadn't spent 6 months refining." "How dare you suggest that we shouldn't spend the last of our savings before we launch finishing the product." "How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that wasn't web standards compliant and passing every accessibility standard." Maybe I should write a joke post that uses some of these?
  - mwcampbell 13y ago
    > "How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that wasn't web standards compliant and passing every accessibility standard." As long as some web developers feel that accessibility is optional, even for a minimum viable product, they will continue to discriminate (howver inadvertently) against some users. In some cases, these users will then be barred from completing some task that is required, because they can't use a particular application, e.g. an application that's required by a particular job or course. Please don't contribute to this problem by suggesting that accessibility is an optional nice-to-have. For users with disabilities who need to use a particular application, it isn't.
    - jot 13y ago
      It makes me very happy that I am never going to convince people like you that accessibility is optional. I can't convince myself of it either when it comes to profitable products. We need more people like you running profitable businesses and ensuring that it is never optional in the (misguided) name of lower costs and more profits. Unfortunately when you build an MVP for the 100% you build it for no one. If accessibility is the most important thing for you then make your product and therefore your MVP for with people with disabilities as your primary audience. I would suggest a much narrower focus than that as its sadly far too big a market to start with.
nine_k 13y ago
Compressing all the questions into one: "How dare you want to be a web developer instead of being a businessman?" Well, being a businessman sometimes makes sense. But usually I deliberately pick being an engineer and not a businessman. Doing business takes a different mindset and a lot of time; it's not easy to do both, and often not fun.
- jot 13y ago
  This is a great observation. If the title of the post was longer it would have been "10 Things You Should Shout at Brilliant Web Developers Who Are Building a Product for Financial Independence" Once you have financial independence or don't want a product of your own you don't need to be a business person. The great thing is, once you successfully get past this ugly bit of doing business you can start ignoring this advice and making products that are better in your eyes.
- fudged71 13y ago
  Kudos. Very important distinction to make.
grasuth 13y ago
Great post, Jon. I real all these "How Dare You" statements as exhortations for developers to question perfection. That questioning is useful, maybe even necessary. Questioning default assumptions is powerful.

52 points by jot 13y ago

Great post. I think a similar issue is when an engineer feels they need a certain set of infrastructure or algorithmic features before they can start building their program. If you end up finding out that most potential users have a different problem though it can all be for waste. I've met many programmers who seem to have forgotten (or never learned) how to prototype, and can't imagine building something with a fundamental security or scalability flaw. There's also a far more difficult one to become aware of, which is building an overly complex solution when a simpler one exists for the problem.

jot 13y ago
Very true. It's not just in the name of 'design' and 'user experience' perfection that developers overly delay their first product.
mikeash 13y ago
I can see passing on scalability, but security? In what circumstances does it make sense to build something with a fundamental security flaw? Getting security right doesn't have to take significantly more time than getting it wrong.

pdog 13y ago

Why is this specific to web developers? All ten things are applicable to anyone selling a product.

jot 13y ago
It doesn't have to be. That said if I made it more abstract the result would likely be less web developers reading it. I've met more web developers that need to hear these things (probably because I spend more time with them than other people building products).
- pdog 13y ago
  Thanks. I just thought people other than web developers should read it too. It's a great list of thought-provoking questions we should all ask of ourselves.
  - jot 13y ago
    Very happy to hear that. Please feel free to re-write/copy chunks of it for another audience, all I ask is that you link back to it :)
nine_k 13y ago
Someone shipping a physical product does not have the luxury to ship a half-baked, bare-bones first version and upgrade it in 6 months for every customer with a click of a button.

jakobe 13y ago

> How dare you assume that your competitors have the time and skill to copy you. Unfortunately your competitors don't need your skills to copy you; once you make your thing public, everybody will see how to do it and copying your product becomes trivial. But the good part is that only successful projects are copied, so you really shouldn't worry about it -- when people start copying you, it means you are on the right track.

jot 13y ago
Have you ever worked on a rebuild? Copying is surprisingly hard, almost never trivial. Check out how bad Rocket Internet's products are compared to the services they copy. They are pros at copying and still they can't get it right. People copy when they know it's worth the risk. That's why successful projects are copied. I agree with you that it is a very good indicator that you are on the right track. :)
- hnriot 13y ago
  Sometimes this is true, but many products are trivial to copy, like Instagram, or twitter. Most of us here could probably copy either of those in a weekend or two.
  - ZoF 13y ago
    Copy basic functionality perhaps.... I doubt the majority here could scale nearly as effectively as both of those companies have....
    - mikeash 13y ago
      I don't know. Scaling as effectively as Twitter doesn't seem like a particularly high bar. They spent a year or so after they got big being down almost as much as they were up. The "fail whale" was just about the most common thing to see on twitter.com. Of course, now that Twitter is established, you cannot repeat their mistakes if you want to succeed.

readme 13y ago

>When you spend weeks or months perfecting your product in the name of 'user experience' or 'design' before selling it, you are doing more harm than good for your users and yourself on your quest to be financially independent Some of us are serious about delivering quality. You are trivializing 2/3 of the web application right there. If it looks like shit and confuses people, no one is going to use it, unless it meets a serious pain point and has absolutely no competition yet, which, is not the case for most of us.

williamcotton 13y ago
What if it turns out that most people are building the wrong products?
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Sometimes the wrong product is a low quality product that does X and the right product might be a high quality product that does X.
  - jot 13y ago
    Today there is a great market for aluminium and glass mobile phones. I wouldn't recommend going into that market if you have limited financial resources. If the first, second or third developer of mobile phones made them out of aluminium and glass rather than plastic do you think they would have been more successful? How about if they gave them away for nothing, or with a total return less than cost price? If you want quality to be your differentiator, you need to already have easy access to a proven market for your core product.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      This applies if you are building a product which is so groundbreakingly new that nobody has any expectations for quality level yet. These products are very rare compared to those which are an evolution of an existing concept. Even with other differentiating factors you are going to struggle to sell a product which has a perception of being below par in terms of quality.

gweinberg 13y ago

It took me a while to convince myself that this wasn't a joke. Obviously, nobody wants to ship a crappy product, and obviously if you insist on perfection your product will never ship. Deciding when a product is "good enough" is a judgement call. Shouting "how dare you" at people who disagree on this judgement call is just stupid.

jot 13y ago
I probably failed to set the context. :) I felt an extreme position was needed to respond to brilliant but highly principled people (who I wished were joking) but I felt were saying things like: "How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that won't work with JavaScript turned off." "How dare you suggest that I would charge for something that doesn't even have feature X." "How dare you suggest that I would ever let a design loose that I hadn't spent 6 months refining." "How dare you suggest that we shouldn't spend the last of our savings before we launch finishing the product." "How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that wasn't web standards compliant and passing every accessibility standard." Maybe I should write a joke post that uses some of these?
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  > "How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that wasn't web standards compliant and passing every accessibility standard." As long as some web developers feel that accessibility is optional, even for a minimum viable product, they will continue to discriminate (howver inadvertently) against some users. In some cases, these users will then be barred from completing some task that is required, because they can't use a particular application, e.g. an application that's required by a particular job or course. Please don't contribute to this problem by suggesting that accessibility is an optional nice-to-have. For users with disabilities who need to use a particular application, it isn't.
  - jot 13y ago
    It makes me very happy that I am never going to convince people like you that accessibility is optional. I can't convince myself of it either when it comes to profitable products. We need more people like you running profitable businesses and ensuring that it is never optional in the (misguided) name of lower costs and more profits. Unfortunately when you build an MVP for the 100% you build it for no one. If accessibility is the most important thing for you then make your product and therefore your MVP for with people with disabilities as your primary audience. I would suggest a much narrower focus than that as its sadly far too big a market to start with.

nine_k 13y ago

Compressing all the questions into one: "How dare you want to be a web developer instead of being a businessman?" Well, being a businessman sometimes makes sense. But usually I deliberately pick being an engineer and not a businessman. Doing business takes a different mindset and a lot of time; it's not easy to do both, and often not fun.

jot 13y ago
This is a great observation. If the title of the post was longer it would have been "10 Things You Should Shout at Brilliant Web Developers Who Are Building a Product for Financial Independence" Once you have financial independence or don't want a product of your own you don't need to be a business person. The great thing is, once you successfully get past this ugly bit of doing business you can start ignoring this advice and making products that are better in your eyes.
fudged71 13y ago
Kudos. Very important distinction to make.

grasuth 13y ago

Great post, Jon. I real all these "How Dare You" statements as exhortations for developers to question perfection. That questioning is useful, maybe even necessary. Questioning default assumptions is powerful.