Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
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Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
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Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#2Author here: over the years this has been my prime strategy on building new stuff. First jQuery Tools, then Head JS, later Riot JS. Happy to talk about minimalism on this weird announcement day.
Happy holidays!
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#3Author here: over the years this has been my prime strategy on building new stuff. First jQuery Tools, then Head JS, later Riot JS. Happy to talk about minimalism on this weird announcement day. Happy holidays!
How do you weigh minimalism in a build vs. buy decision?
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#4At a recent job, people were advocating for ginkgo, a non-standard "reinvents the wheel" type of testing framework in golang. If you don't know golang, it has near perfect tooling out of the box, including a standard test framework.
I joined on the brink of this decision i.e. moving to ginkgo. I was the first and only person to ask what does ginkgo do that "go test" does not for us? Nobody could really answer that.
Turns out, much like myself, and most engineers who weren't Googlers at the time, didn't really know golang and its environment. They all kinda assumed that like any other popular language, esp. for system programming (like C++) golang in its infancy requires a test framework supplement.
Well, no it doesn't. "go test" is standard which if we're lucky, means we never have to re-write tests 10-20 years down the line because it's the standard.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#5I see the point but I don't agree with the author. If I'm not mistaken that it took more than two years just to build their product and they're still pivoting in a way that they can monetize their users. I'm not actually sure if this delay is caused by your minimalism approach but startups usually need to focus on their core business in order to be able to find the product-market fit.
In an ideal world, we should be focusing only on our core business, not the tooling around the product. OK, you just set up a hook for your error events in your front-end code that lets you collect the errors as events but Sentry is doing much more than that. If it is the only feature that you need, that's OK but the reality is that as your application code grows, you will need many more features for your error tracking.
Eventually, you will need the UIs that lets you understand the context of the user, aggregate multiple events as one exception, send the errors to the relevant people, etc. and you will spend much more time building out these features and the switching cost to a real error tracking tool will be much higher.
The tools such as Sentry and Google Analytics provide an opinionated way to accomplish specific set of tasks for typical use-cases. The advantage is that they have seen many customers, use-cases and edge cases so adopted their product in order to cover them all. You don't need to the same unless it's your core business.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#6Great article. I wish more people would understand minimalism and accept it as company/product culture. Web bloat is ridiculous and worth fighting.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#7.. This would make sense if it worked. There's a fine line between "not-developed-here syndrome" and minimalism-as-you-mention-it.
If you can account for all the problems with the basic functionality the original big library tried to solve, this might work. But, if you're rediscovering all the problems again, and trying to solve them again, it's probably not the best use of your time.
Further, if something is big enough to become a norm (like Disqus for comments) - creating yet another sign-up form for comments has enough friction to discourage at least me from commenting. (And the one on this blog is broken).
I'm not saying your approach is wrong, but there's pros and cons to both, which don't seem to be captured here.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#8I like using minimalism as an starting place, but I think it's idealistic in most cases.
We use senrty and we rely on many of the features you miss out on by just posting minimal exception information.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#9Author here: over the years this has been my prime strategy on building new stuff. First jQuery Tools, then Head JS, later Riot JS. Happy to talk about minimalism on this weird announcement day. Happy holidays!
The link for the Disqus bullet (to try your alternative commenting system at the bottom of the page) is broken. It points to:
https://volument.com/blog/minimalism-the-most-undervalued-de...
... but what you want is:
https://volument.com/blog/minimalism-the-most-undervalued-de...
Two things suggest you've still got some work to do cutting out the crap:
1. The commenting widget manages to foil my ability to select text and keep it selected.
2. If I disable JS (see #1) and reload the page, I just see one big blob of gray-green-blue.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#10I see the point but I don't agree with the author. If I'm not mistaken that it took more than two years just to build their product and they're still pivoting in a way that they can monetize their users. I'm not actually sure if this delay is caused by your minimalism approach but startups usually need to focus on their core business in order to be able to find the product-market fit. In an ideal world, we should be…
Yeah, I came in here to call out the error tracking use case...a good error tracker needs to do a _lot_ more than that.