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Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
61–70 of 179 posts
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#62I 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.
Good for all projects, but how much does the project at hand actually require? And adding dependencies later is a lot easier than removing them.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#63Reductionist garbage. Their "minimalist" sentry clone literally does nothing as presented on the page. There must be a back end that stores errors and an interface to view them, etc.
There's a reason most apps are complex: because the world is complex. Making software that does nothing and pretending it's as useful as real software in the name of fashion, "minimalism" is frankly unimpressive and uninteresting. There are no shortcuts in real life. No matter how good their sentry backend is, I guarantee it's not nearly as useful because they almost certainly left out the ui that makes sentry the useful tool it is.
So tired of articles about fashion.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#64"Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler." ~Einstein
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#65I have super mixed feelings on this. Minimalism makes for a clean, easy to understand codebase, that avoids some of the performance pitfalls associated with bigness. But sometimes it’s easy to build 80% of what you need, and then massively difficult to get to 100%, and the ease of getting to 80% can lead you astray. For instance, I can write a pretty fast matrix multiplication algorithm in maybe a few dozen lines of…
I agree with what you're saying about how the greedy approach to covering all your cases isn't usually optimal, but if a manager tells me that their rat's nest of a 30-year-old enterprise software codebase is an outcome comparable to the decades of research put into matrix multiplication algorithms, I'm going to assume that department is bonkers until proven otherwise.
Often these systems grow according to that greedy approach, sprouting a feature here and there as sales tells the team to add things, and then you're left with a system that was more grown than designed.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#66Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've also gone the other direction from minimalism in codebases, and consider it a positive change as a developer. As a junior, I always wanted to roll my own: roll my own advanced multi-select autocomplete input, roll my own Modbus communication library, roll my own internal tool for the company to use rather than an existing product, etc. So what happened? Now we have a relatively buggy implementation that we have…
It looks like yours was a case of NIH syndrome. That has nothing to do with minimalism.
NIH is absolutely relevant here since article showed 3 (out of 3) examples of it.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#68"Be minimalist and don't use third party libraries and services. Except for ours. Use ours, because we don't have two decades of cruft under our belt excuse me, we're /minimal/. The article kinda uses a language of a sentiment I share to an extent (I think most devs are far too eager to pull dependencies — avoiding NIH doesn't mean you have to pull the entire 3rd party dependency, not if you can read a paper and impl…
> while a completely in-house analytics package could be smaller, there's a reason why commercial packages are big
But are those reasons your reasons, and do some of them warrant questioning in the first place?
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#69I 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.
I suppose your requirements are different. We want to deal with errors like we deal with inbox, fix issues until we have "inbox zero". On our case that is all the client we need. There's obviously more logic on the backend, but not much.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#70This page is completely empty on iOS.
I guess the author should have made a minimalist static HTML page instead.