Minimalism – An undervalued development skill • Hacker News Board

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#131

Post by dana321 » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 11:56 PM UTC

A minimal core with just enough functionality to be useful, then a plugin framework with hooks for all the other features that everyone else needs to build in.

A minimal phone with just enough functionality to be useful, then an app store to get all of other functionality you need via downloadable apps.

Its a model that works well, providing an ecosystem to anyone who wishes to extend.

Code is kind of the same now.. Get the basic thing going, then people fork it, improve it, submit patches, sometimes over decades.

The worst software imho, is a closed architecture that has the kitchen sink included that nobody can extend.

Modularism and a pluggable architecture is much better than just minimalism on its own.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#132

Post by tipiirai » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 11:57 PM UTC

xwowsersx wrote: post #110

What do those pie charts show (e.g. Disqus vs Custom)? No idea how to read those.

It's comparing the size of the code.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#133

Post by jarofgreen » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 11:58 PM UTC

This touches on the topic of doing something yourself vs getting someone else to do it for you, and I would recommend anyone interested check out Wardley Mapping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map It's a way to generate discussion in your company/project/whatever about when it's appropriate to custom-roll, and when you should use commodity.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#134

Post by tipiirai » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 12:01 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #127

volument wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a JavaScript error on the commenting component due to a comment from a user that removed their account. Now fixed. Thanks!

Do you appreciate the irony that your article that brags about writing your own comment system was taken down by a bad comment?

Haha. I little — have to say. I'm actually quite happy how well it works. This is only the second time the commenting widget is in active production use.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#135

Post by kevindong » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

First and foremost: beautiful and performant website.

I don't understand how exactly the Volument product actually performs A/B testing (or distinguishes between different variants). The only code docs [0] I've found are very, very light on details and doesn't mention how the active variant is detected. To be fair, the product hasn't launched yet so perhaps the docs are currently internal-only.

That being said, very interesting idea of linking engagement to eventual conversion to get "results" faster. It certainly seems reasonable that there is a causation relationship (increased engagement, e.g. more scrolling and longer visit duration, eventually leading to increased conversion), but I don't know how statistically valid that is.

[0]: https://volument.com/learn/client-api

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#136

Post by jopsen » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 12:41 AM UTC

domlebo70 wrote: post #120

hadiz wrote: post #4

At 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.…

> If you don't know golang, it has near perfect tooling out of the box, including a standard test framework. Does it really?

I would agree, "near perfect" seems a bit extreme.

But golang tooling is often simple and "good enough", which IMO is sometimes the best option available :)

Never underestimate "good enough" - it's good enough :D (But don't try to explain that to someone you're dating, LOL)

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#137

Post by useragent86 » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 12:42 AM UTC

volument wrote: post #76

xwowsersx wrote: post #72

I just see a blank grayish blue page.

This was due to a comment from a removed user. Now fixed. Thanks!

I still see a blank greenish-gray page.

It appears to be because the BODY element has a CSS rule setting "opacity: 0", which appears to be for the purpose of enabling a CSS transition to fade in the page on load. Not exactly minimalism in terms of complexity, but it does appear minimalist in terms of content when the page is blank. :P

Presumably the transition is triggered by some JavaScript. However, that JavaScript fails to execute because cookies are disabled, which causes an error:

    Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.
    at new u (https://volument.com/v1/volument.js:17:858)
    at window.volument (https://volument.com/v1/volument.js:17:133)
    at https://volument.com/global/index.js?b:1:14673
    at https://volument.com/global/index.js?b:1:60085

As a result, when cookies are disabled and JavaScript is enabled, the page appears blank.

If I had a dollar for every time nowadays that I see a blank Web page because of invisible-by-default content that's made visible by JavaScript that fails to execute because it can't handle blocked cookies...

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#138

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 1:00 AM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #32

bertr4nd wrote: post #23

I 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…

The message I took from this article was minimalism in features and not necessarily code. And certainly not about library usage. If you're building a product, focus on building a few key features extremely well. I suspect that part of the reason for feature bloat is that a when product is assigned dedicated, long-running teams, it tends not to reach an 'end state'. The team would rarely say "okay, now the product is…

[deleted]

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#139

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 1:04 AM UTC

mlochbaum wrote: post #114

3xblah wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use APL for matrix multiplication Minimalism without sacrafice in performance Look at kx.com, shakti.com

Do not use APL if your main requirement is fast matrix multiplication. I implement Dyalog APL—our matrix multiply is not as good as typical BLAS implementations and I think this is also true of other APLs (most currently maintained APLs are not performance-focused). J replaced their matrix multiply with a good BLAS-based implementation a few years ago but only supports double-precision floats and tends to be slower t…

[deleted]

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#140

Post by legulere » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 1:11 AM UTC

hadiz wrote: post #4

At 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.…

Integrated stuff can sometimes also be borderline unusable. For the .NET project we’re currently working on we decided to log using system.diagnostics.tracesource and co. It happens rather regularly that we wonder why something doesn’t get logged and we wonder where something gets logged to.