Earlier quoted context omitted.
Single biggest technical thing, anyway. IMO, the single biggest thing is focus and clarity in their communication. If people without a working mental model of software development can’t instantly understand the tangible problem it solves in their existing business process, they won’t even scroll past the break, let alone pay for it. Consolidation and modularity are solutions, but people don’t go shopping for solution…
Fair point. I know little to nothing about design, and don’t really care about it. It’s not that I think it’s unimportant, it’s just not something I want to expend any time learning. To be fair, I’m also not trying to create any user-facing products. To me, rsync.net is peak design. It has just enough modernity to appeal to people who might expect that, but it quickly gets out of the way and tells you what it is, why…
As a full-time developer for a decade, and in other technical roles for a decade before that, I had a few similar experiences with designers. One repeatedly insisted that Wordpress along with their ramshackle loopdy-looped spaghetti php plugin (still including comments from the tutorials they copied tidbits of code from) was robust enough to enough to replace our very tight Django-based code base that did a hell of a lot more than serve up our website… but they insisted it would take half as long to reimplement it all in php. There wasn’t even a good reason for it– they learned everything they knew about development by osmosis from working on web projects, and a mishmash of articles they read on the topic over the years, and after getting one piece of code to work in a low volume application, thought they were a dual-field specialist. That’s actually pretty rare among designers, but developers that feel that way about design are the norm. We all know what Larry Wall thought the three most important traits were for developers…