Off topic, but… “For the oldest amongst us this kind of lessons came from 37Signals…books Rework and Getting Real”. So the “oldest among us” are what, 40?
Good software knows when to stop
271–280 of 304 posts
Re: Good software knows when to stop
#272We should normalize "finished" software products that stop feature creep and focus strictly on bug fixes and security updates. It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand. Evernote and Dropbox were perfect in 2012. Adding more features just to chase new user growth of…
It’s funny, Express.js tried this. 4.x was basically a complete piece of software. There weren’t any great reasons to change the API. But people hated that. They considered it “unmaintained”. They moved to Koa and Hono because they appeared to be more “actively maintained”.
Well it works better if your users have some intelligence^H^H^H wisdom. :)
Re: Good software knows when to stop
#273In 2020 I became a full time Java developer, coming from a infrastructure role where I kind of dealt with Java code, but always as artifacts I managed in application servers and whatnot. So when I first started dealing with the actual code, it scared me that the standard json library was basically in maintenance mode for some years back then. The standard unit test framework and lot of other key pieces too. I interpr…
> But it seems that no one truly want that. We want the shiny things. We wrote the same frameworks in Java, then python the go then node the JavaScript the typescript. I think that people are just afraid that if they use a library in maintenance, they will run into a bug and it'll never get fixed. So they figure it's safer to adopt something undergoing further development, because then if there are issues they will g…
If you need a bug to get fixed, hoping someone else is going to do it is not a good strategy anyway. Just fix the bug yourself.
I think people are mostly just cargo culting tbh.
Re: Good software knows when to stop
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
The counter-example, in classic MMO terms, is Ultima Online adding non-PVP game instances in response to player feedback. Without the dramatic threat of PVP conflict at most times, UO was less emotionally engaging. The non-PVP players were bored without the emotional excitement (stress, danger, whatever) of ad hoc PVP. The PVP-focused players were bored when all the reputational mechanics became more or less meaningl…
Arc Raiders and other involuntary pvp games will miss out on players like me who will not try it until pvp is optional and voluntary. Involuntary pvp is the long term death sentence for a game. It punishes new players by making them easy prey for veteran players. Player numbers will fall hard and fast, like every other involuntary pvp game does.
What are you talking about? The top 3 most played games on Steam are all “involuntary pvp” games - Counter-Strike, Dota 2, PUBG. These are all games with a lot of age on them as well.
None of them are easy for new players, with Dota 2 in particular requiring at least 2000 hours to have a chance of not being horrible at the game. Yet it isn’t causing any fall off. Instead it is binding people’s lives to these games, achieving retention rates that easier games can only dream of.
Re: Good software knows when to stop
#275Definitely that, a finite scope is good and finished software is beautiful. But also, most of the modern software is in what I call "eternal beta". The assumption that your users always have an internet connection creates a perverse incentive structure where "you can always ship an update", and in most cases there's one singular stream of updates so new features (that no one asked for btw) and bug fixes can't be deco…
The issue is that a finite scope is paid once (and often pirated, so not even that), while subscription SaaS are paid perpetually, so there's more money there.
We should have a system where we continue paying for software that we keep using even if it doesn't change, but that's never going to happen, we will start wondering how we will replace it and cut costs.
Re: Good software knows when to stop
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember we made a switch to redis because java's memcached library was unmaintained. I made I joke that it's just feature-complete and cannot be improved upon, people chuckled, but we still did the switch.
Quite a bit of risk telescoping there...because you had the source code to the memcached library so in the theoretical case you found a bug in mature code (how many times have you seen that?), you weren't SOL. So instead you switched to an entirely new system? If you were trying to minimize risk and cost, you did the opposite unless memcached was doing something else that was a problem.
It wasn't entirely just that, we had to switch to redis for another sub-system and IIRC there some positive implication for cache layer as well. It's been awhile it wasn't just because memcached libary was unmaintained.
Re: Good software knows when to stop
#277Re: Good software knows when to stop
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
And people liked that model, see the huge backlash when Adobe went subscription for creative suite. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I upgrade my camera maybe once every ~7 years. Cameras have largely been good enough since 2016 and the 5D Mark IV. I have a pair of R6 mk II that I'll probably hold onto for the next 10 years. Point being, Lightroom has more or less been feature complete for me for a very, ve…
What backlash against Adobe? I think you are mistaking comment section consensus for reality. People on forums and social media complain, but the comment section consensus is often dead wrong! There was no real backlash against Adobe. They added subscriptions and grew revenue. Some people grumbled online, but they paid, which means they don’t like the old model, they like the new one.
A company abusing monopoly power to screw over consumers doesn't prove that consumers like to be abused.
Re: Good software knows when to stop
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're upset, yet they're paying for it. It sounds like the software was underpriced, because people are still using it. Honestly, blame the consumers, not the businesses in these scenarios.
For lightroom at least, no, because there are very few or even no good alternatives. It looks like there are a lot of photo editor apps out there, but most of them are crap or designed for different workflows. I can say because I evaluated various options before begrudging accepting lightroom was the only decent choice. The subscription model irks me because it's a bit overpriced and they keep trying to shove subscri…
I’m surprised capture one wasn’t able to meet your needs, as an ex-heavy Lightroom user that has been very happy with their transition to C1 with a perpetual license.
What about it ended up not working out for you?
Re: Good software knows when to stop
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been in situations where a user makes a feature request and I don’t think it makes sense, but because they’ve been polite and understanding I decide to take the time to explain exactly why it wouldn’t work, but while doing so I basically rubber duck and come up with solutions to the problems I’m describing (which the user hasn’t foreseen yet). Sometimes that ends with me discovering yet even stronger reasons t…
A variant of the first is the highly imaginative user who keeps coming up with new variations or expansions of their idea. It’s not malicious but it can be exhausting. Especially if you try to address their core need but their imagination doesn’t extend quite far enough to see how your effort would help, because they love their ideas.
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