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I could do that in a weekend (2016)

danluu.com

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Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#41

Post by dvirsky »

abnry wrote: post #11

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.

Also sounds a bit like Dunning Kruger. It looks easy because people are ignorant of how hard the problem is.

Many years ago I built a search engine for a very big discussion board website, which had hundreds of millions of messages. Keep in mind back then a powerful server had 2GB of RAM and a pretty slow CPU and HDD, so it had to be distributed across multiple shards to work fast enough, and there was no Elastic Search back then, so it really was hard work, plus getting the ranking and quality tuned was a huge effort. Of course when we launched it people responded with "I don't get what the big deal is, why can't you just run a SELECT WHERE LIKE query and get it over with over the weekend?". It was hurtful at first but then I realized how ignorant the person making such a statement is about the problem.

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#42

Post by grawprog »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #8

One 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…

Even with simple projects.. I just finished working on redoing a static webpage for a client. Really simple, started at 17 pages, cut it down to 6 pages, only text and images with a contact form and a few links. I ended up having to build 3 different versions just to get a layout and design that worked for the client's business and another version I built initially for my own working environment the customer never even seen and wasn't charged for.

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#43

Post by Havoc »

I suspect this is connected to the happy path coding phenomenon. The core issue probably IS that easy. But you need to cover all the edge cases reasonably well too to have a business and those you can’t necessarily see until you start coding

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#44

Post by shuckles »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #40
shuckles wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cases like this, it’s always useful to have an expansive definition of “user”. For example, day to day experiences for caretakers might have degraded under the new patient information system, but maybe it’s now easier to produce charts which bosses want. For better or worse, they are users of the system as well. To whom a change is worthwhile often leads to unexpected beneficiaries with unexpected motivations.

So maybe let the caretakers work in peace and have one additional person draw pretty charts out of thin air which would be just as good? I've been working on a product which everybody was convinced had Gantt chart functionality. Said functionality was using the venerable Math.random() top to bottom, with nobody being the wiser.

Malicious compliance is certainly one approach, but an org which relies on it is probably messing up in a way that will leak to everything else. I never said the desire for reporting was useful, but it is fundamental to how management works in most places today.

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#45

Post by forgotmypw17 »

bern4444 wrote: post #23

Fun article, but exceptionally difficult to read. I know some people like using plain ol html, but just a few lines of CSS would vastly improve the reading experience. I know its from 2016, but still. Eyes read best when content is a few hundred pixels long. Content should be centered etc. It's pretty terrible as it is

One of the nice things about HTML/CSS is that there's such a thing as "user styles", which can apply on top (or instead of) the "author styles".

Opera pioneered this interface, AFAIK, and even had one-click toggle buttons for both author and user styles (as well as images), but most of today's browsers don't make this functionality transparent and available. I suppose you could do via dev tools?

For a simple change like what you're asking, perhaps even changing browser's font settings would suffice?

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#46

Post by nmz »

bern4444 wrote: post #23

Fun article, but exceptionally difficult to read. I know some people like using plain ol html, but just a few lines of CSS would vastly improve the reading experience. I know its from 2016, but still. Eyes read best when content is a few hundred pixels long. Content should be centered etc. It's pretty terrible as it is

get stylish then

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#47

Post by nottorp »

pgm8705 wrote: post #5

Similar thing with comments whenever a Slack related article ends up on HN. "I don't understand how a shitty IRC clone is worth billions of dollars!" or "Why would anyone use Slack when Matrix is free!" I often wonder if these folks haven't even bothered to actually use the software and realize how much more it does beyond sending messages back and forth and/or how much detail and thought goes into making it usable f…

It's not a shitty irc clone, it has a lot of useful features (and some not so useful, looking at you threads).

Now the client on the other hand...

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#48

Post by SilasX »

slongfield wrote: post #16
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #8

One 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.

Except today more often I see "Our devs put together a basically usable UI, then we ramped up and hired a full time UXer, and it sucks now."

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#49

Post by SilasX »

If you're going to make this criticism, I feel you also need to be capable of recognizing when such criticism actually is valid [1]. That is, under which circumstances would someone be justified in saying "okay this is not an optimal problem"

(A famous example from the other direction was when Uber re-engineered a querying service to better fit the use case, where several HNers and a Medium article showed why their re-invented wheel was worse than an off-the-shelf solution that they just weren't using correctly [2].)

If you can't satisfy that, then this feels like a fully-general rejection of any claim that an org has over-complicated a problem or has unnecessary bloat, and/or that no one can criticize until they've personally worked (for n months) at the org. Which itself would be hard to defend.

[1] Based on my "Scylla-Charybdis"/Goldilocks Heuristic: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2015/12/the-scylla-charybd...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21537008

Re: I could do that in a weekend (2016)

#50

Post by superjan »

One other thing is, many of you could write something like a mouse driver in a weekend. That is not enough for the business however. The UI needs to be Electron based for easy maintenance, and you need to add telemetry, because how else will you know if people actually use your product? So you need backend and API teams too for each platform.
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