We embraced minimalism on my team a long time ago—no tests, no docs or comments, variable names are usually 1 or 2 characters, no indentation, no code reviews or QA, no meetings, etc.
...even no code. /s
Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
101–110 of 179 posts
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#102If you value minimalism, then why doesn't the page load any text when Javascript is disabled?
"chickenshit minimalism"
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#103There seems to be a bug in the comment form on their site. It gives me the option to edit/delete the last comment and when it asks me to create an account, it shows me someone else's email address. I feel like this is the major reason for not rolling your own.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#104I 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…
Microsoft applications released as store apps were an attempt at minimalism in features. Their music, skype, mail, even the control panel replacement "settings." Windows 10 has been cutting features left and right.
To Microsoft, minimalism means:
Rebuild a popular piece of software from scratch
Release the NEW improved shiny app that follows a new design fad. Gloss over the fact that it's unreliable, slower, more crash prone & lacks over 50% of the old apps features by promising fix the 'issues' and missing features with future updates.
Retire the old but fully featured (still working) app while the new stuff still lacks basic functionality.
Retire this NEW stuff when it's still lacking promised features. And replace it something that lacks even more features.
Windows 10's attempts at minimalism means that a feature you rely on today might be gone forever with the next update or hidden - requiring a treasure hunt.
There's just one app that MS didn't screw up by going minimal -- OneNote. I still can't figure out the Win32 version. The store version just clicks for me. They once included an excellent RADIAL Menu for OneNote but removed it inexplicably.
(Radial Menu of OneNOte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Job4Rg-sbDo)
*
Developers pursing minimalism tend to release software that:
Require too many steps to accomplish simple tasks because controls are HIDDEN away behind hamburger menus and/or frustrating gestures. Example - windows 8's charm bar that required moving the mouse off screen to the top right corner to reveal the settings menu.
Have too much white space - and have tiny text (self explanatory)
Replace intuitive, native, user friendly controls with a Minimal but frustrating version - example removing the Underline of hyperlinks in webpages, even changing the mouse icon on hover. Sometimes, links and normal texts are indistinguishable. Another example super tiny (or hidden) scroll bars
Going mobile only - even when the site / service doesn't use any mobile only features.
Mobile first - Mobile first and minimalism are often mentioned together and is an excuse to release featureless but bloated websites or apps.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#105There seems to be a bug in the comment form on their site. It gives me the option to edit/delete the last comment and when it asks me to create an account, it shows me someone else's email address. I feel like this is the major reason for not rolling your own.
[deleted]
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Recently, on my first software job (freelance) I messed this up. I had very little opportunity for contact with the client and they were slow and unreliable with providing feedback. I could tell we would go over schedule if I didn’t produce a lot more work with each feedback cycle and I desperately wanted to do a good job so I let myself get weighed down with imagining things that they might think I was stupid for no…
Send a spec of what’s reasonable given the budget and ask for approval before continuing. If you’re worried about bugs increasing the time consider adding a contingency to the budget. Pad everything out a bit. If this runs to multiple cycles, give them deadlines for feedback and push out the schedule if you don’t hear in time.
Also if it’s your first time and you need the cash and experience, you can overdeliver a little. But if nobody is ever unhappy with you then be aware that you probably are overdelivering.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#107This applies at all levels of the stack, even hardware. I realize the author is talking about javascript, but I can think of several hardware projects where minimalism is clearly superior. At a previous employer (whom I cannot talk about), we were working on an ASIC. The ASIC team was new, brought in for the job, and was eager to include every possible feature that stakeholders wanted. The stakeholders seem to view t…
I deal a lot with white box networking hardware and software and have never encountered this bug. Can you point me to some more info? Thank you.
See "ixl_detect_sparse()" in the FreeBSD ixl driver:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/dev/ixl/ixl_txrx.c?...
Or __i40e_chk_linearize in the Linux i40e driver: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
And their 100g NIC has the same bug (at least according to the FreeBSD driver that's in review now).
ARGH!
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#108KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid is my mantra
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#109This applies at all levels of the stack, even hardware. I realize the author is talking about javascript, but I can think of several hardware projects where minimalism is clearly superior. At a previous employer (whom I cannot talk about), we were working on an ASIC. The ASIC team was new, brought in for the job, and was eager to include every possible feature that stakeholders wanted. The stakeholders seem to view t…
I'm glad to hear other people talking about how great the Intel 82599/Niantic was and how they have come off the rails since then. I'm so fed up that my new year's resolution is to make a new NIC that's like the 82599 but more so.
I worked for another NIC vendor at the time, and we were totally in awe of the 8259x. We had a 10G NIC that could do line rate with full packets, but we did a lot of PCIe in firmware, so we could only handle ~1.5Mpps (about 10% of line rate in terms of pps).
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#110What do those pie charts show (e.g. Disqus vs Custom)? No idea how to read those.