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Trouble with Diaspora

blog.steveklabnik.com

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Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#151

Post by mkramlich »

steveklabnik wrote: post #93
dododo wrote: post #90

it's insulting to refer to them as kids and criticism like this is only helpful if you give examples: this article does not do that, just making wide sweeping statements about "how bad" it all is. i had a quick look at github, it didn't look like it stunk, but i don't know ruby nor the framework they use. they didn't appear to use pbkdf2 or similar to derive their crypto keys, so that isn't good. but at least they di…

I call everyone 'kids,' it's not meant to be offensive. I'm 24 myself. The 'here's why' part gets tricky with security stuff. I don't want to be complicit in people trashing accounts. And if you read, I did submit patches. And they are making up their own protocol. It's currently not documented.

yep. in common usage it often seems 'kids' is a reference to anyone no older than 5-10 years younger than oneself. ;)

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#152

Post by kbatten »

My god most of these comments are sickening. It sounds like a group of old men reinforcing each other how much better people were "back in their day" all the while forgetting what "back in their day" actually was. Is it jealousy that is fostering these posts?

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#154

Post by c00p3r »

ohyes wrote: post #39

This code was written by a bunch of undergraduate college students. This is hiring a bunch of interns (with near zero experience) to implement your product, giving them three months, and then being shocked -- SHOCKED, when the code is not professional grade quality. I was shocked when everyone and their brother was willing to shell out money to a group of completely unproven college students to produce a distributed…

hiring a bunch of interns (with near zero experience) to implement your product - that is how a nearly 90% of projects are started, due to pure economical reason. ^_^

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#156

Post by daychilde »

c00p3r wrote: post #154
ohyes wrote: post #39

This code was written by a bunch of undergraduate college students. This is hiring a bunch of interns (with near zero experience) to implement your product, giving them three months, and then being shocked -- SHOCKED, when the code is not professional grade quality. I was shocked when everyone and their brother was willing to shell out money to a group of completely unproven college students to produce a distributed…

hiring a bunch of interns (with near zero experience) to implement your product - that is how a nearly 90% of projects are started, due to pure economical reason. ^_^

I'm an intern with near zero experience... Anyone hiring? ;-)

(Well, I have more than zero experience... maybe I'm overqualified)

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#157

Post by daychilde »

logicalmind wrote: post #113
cies wrote: post #17

"Release early, release often" (an open source mantra). Here on HN i also find the 'getto launch' being preached -- "if you not embarrest by your product at lauch-time, you should have released earlier". Judging from the noise their release makes here on HN i think the diaspora guys did well opening up their repo 'early'. And to steve: i think you hold 'professional programmers' (which i interpret as programmer that…

A related question would be, is this their minimally viable product. And how secure does a minimally viable product need to be?

I think a little more security is needed for this to be any sort of "viable"... So I suppose I'd argue that this definitely is not MVP.

OTOH, they themselves seemed to have said it's not MVP either, so I think that's okay.

I'm still concerned about the longer-term viability using the reasoning of "This many basic mistakes doesn't bode well", but time will tell.

I wish them the best of luck.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#158

Post by c00p3r »

daychilde wrote: post #156
c00p3r wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hiring a bunch of interns (with near zero experience) to implement your product - that is how a nearly 90% of projects are started, due to pure economical reason. ^_^

I'm an intern with near zero experience... Anyone hiring? ;-) (Well, I have more than zero experience... maybe I'm overqualified)

Join a group, and together you will be a gang! ^_^

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#159

Post by 10ren »

10ren wrote: post #116
jat850 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will certainly concede that, especially given that this isn't anywhere near my realm of knowledge - I'm strictly a coder and don't have the vision or insight into product presentation, preparation, or anything like that. However, my instinct tells me that the example you mention of say, an ad + landing page, IS an MVP in one good sense - to gauge interest in a potential product (an iPhone app, etc), gathering subsc…

At the moment, their primary task is actually to gauge/encourage interest - without that, they have lost. A following task is to discover if what they have is usable/useful by real people, and the only real test of that is to release it and get feedback. Related is flushing out bugs (most effectively done by actual usage); testing performance (even for small numbers of users); and of course flushing out specific priv…

It's fun to think of a software product as a giant ADT (Abstract Data Type), as it specifies operations that may be carried out (via a GUI, or command line, or webpage, or webservice, etc), while the detail of the implementation of those operations is hidden. Each instance (running copy) of a software product contains its own data.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#160

Post by djhworld »

mlinsey wrote: post #106
moron4hire wrote: post #81

This is the problem: college students are terrible programmers. There aren't enough consequences for writing bad code in college. In industry, you learn very quickly that everything you learned in college is minuscule compared to what you actually need to know to work. I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even…

I agree with you up until your last paragraph "a startup was probably the worst endeavor for them". The sheer gumption to throw yourself whole-heartedly at problems you are unqualified to solve is one of the most important characteristics of a startup founder. Even if you spent time learning to be a great coder, there would be a dozen other things you'd need to be doing for the first time when you first start a start…

I think the problem with Diaspora is that it received much attention from the media (during the Facebook privacy issue being top of the agenda for most tech/mainstream news bulletins)

Whether that media campaign was orchestrated by the developers, or their investors, or just surfaced naturally as some news stories tend to do, I think this attention didn't really help matters when it came to putting a group of inexperienced graduates together to create what potentially should be a rival to a multi billion dollar company in one summer.

They should have been given more time and let to lead more of a low profile than the charade that's taken place over the past few months

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