You Release Late and Infrequently • Hacker News Board

Re: You Release Late and Infrequently

#21

Post by wingo » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 9:30 PM UTC

I was about to raise the point that "release early, release often" is a phrase from free software, and wonder at its appropriation by commerce, but it turns out it's from ESR. Perhaps it is appropriate, then.

(The majority of my hack is not for customers.)

Re: You Release Late and Infrequently

#22

Post by dstorrs » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 10:14 PM UTC

10ren wrote: post #3

Wikipedia has links that go nowhere. But it does still sound a bit dodgey, I think because to get accurate feedback, you necessarily need to fool people. For example, if you had a link that stated it was a proposed feature, it would affect the clickrate. Or maybe it wouldn't? Maybe interest would be enough. Perhaps this could be experimentally tested.

Personally, I think I would feel ok about putting the link up and having it go simply to a landing page that said "This feature is still in production. Please comment below on how we could best suit it to your needs."

Re: You Release Late and Infrequently

#23

Post by lrm242 » Tue, Jan 12, 2010, 2:49 AM UTC

omouse wrote: post #15

bradfordcross wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting criticisms of PB's approach to building gmail. Can you share a link to a product you've shipped in the past 12 months and some of your experiences about building it?

Is that an appeal to authority I hear? I haven't worked on a product that has shipped in the last 12 months but I have worked with several programming languages and have read some Dijkstra and have done some literate programming, and have gone to university/college for a few years now. My criticism was based on the stuff PB said. All of that functionality could have been done in a single version but PB didn't want to…

GMail has 100+ million users[1]. Imagine how many they could have if they actually did ship something. Crappy development model or not, does it really matter? The thing is widely successful and any insight into how it came about is valuable as a learning experience.

[1]: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc3d8a86-02a0-11de-b58b-000077b076...