Sounds like the Pareto Principle at play: 80% of the product is created with 20% of the effort. It is getting the next 19%, then 0.9%, then 0.09%, and so on, that is the challenge.
I could do that in a weekend (2016)
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#12One could build a self driving prototype in a weekend of hacking (using the libraries, tooling, etc available) and train it. I think it's a perfect example of the weekend prototype vs production reality difference.
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#13[deleted]
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#14"I could do that in a weekend" is obviously idiotic but why choose Google as the example (possibly the hardest piece of software to replicate)?
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#15Any chance you could add, that wide text is really hard to read body > *:not(pre) { max-width: 600px; margin-left: auto; display: block; margin-right: auto; } pre { max-width: 1200px; margin: 40px auto; background: #f6f6f6; padding: 16px; }
I could do that in a weekend.
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#16One other thing he touched on in passing: people are assuming they'd know what to build from the start. Even in relatively trivial applications a lot of work goes into finding the right way to express what you're trying to build. I recently worked on a small app and spent 40 hours trying out different approaches to the user interface. The solution I went with could be coded up in about 2 hours, but I had to do 38 hou…
“I didn't have time to write you a simple UI, so I wrote you a complicated one instead.” -- Mark Twain, paraphrased.
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#17> A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever.
Fully agree, and would extend to any social organization. One of the most important aspects of organizational efficiency is managing the signal/noise ratio of internal communications. We now have the ability to turn effective bureaucratic protocols into material reality with automated information systems.
The organizations, whether private or public, that best tackle this problem will come out on top on the 21st century, regardless of ideology and historical advantage.
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#18One other thing he touched on in passing: people are assuming they'd know what to build from the start. Even in relatively trivial applications a lot of work goes into finding the right way to express what you're trying to build. I recently worked on a small app and spent 40 hours trying out different approaches to the user interface. The solution I went with could be coded up in about 2 hours, but I had to do 38 hou…
Totally agree. I always get in trouble when I say that we must build a first version to get a “feel” for the task and then refine for a while. This may involve scrapping the whole thing a few times. This is especially true if something is totally new. Once you have an established UX it’s much easier to plan and make changes.
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#19maybe part of the whole conversations is survivorship bias? id be interested to see data on the past positions and companies people on both sides of the argument have worked on. ie: if you have seen how teams of hundreds are justified, it makes sense. likewise, if you have only worked on small teams, its hard to understand what 100s of engineers would do.
its been a few years but i knew of multiple alexa-100 sites that were all running on just two 4 core servers(this is back when alexa was a useful measure of size, mind you). managed essentially by the hosting company. so "scale" is not always directly linked to traffic, i would think complexity dictates the need for more engineers rather then size.
Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)
#20Any chance you could add, that wide text is really hard to read body > *:not(pre) { max-width: 600px; margin-left: auto; display: block; margin-right: auto; } pre { max-width: 1200px; margin: 40px auto; background: #f6f6f6; padding: 16px; }
There is a firefox extension that I use, called Stylus[1], that lets you add custom CSS to websites. The thing that helps most is that Stylus lets you browse other people's styles for website, and there are already themes for Dan Luu's website.