You can always do less
37signals.com
You can always do less
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: You can always do less
#2Old truth, but it never hurts to remind ourselves.
Re: You can always do less
#3"For every 1 day estimates of a task, there’s a simpler version of that you can do in 3 hours, and an even simpler still you can do in 30 minutes. Back yourself into a corner and these versions will vividly appear before your eye. You can always do less."
I wonder if this was the reasoning behind 37s' storing passwords in plaintext instead of taking an extra 10 minutes to write the code to encrypt them?
Re: You can always do less
#4The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less.
See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...
Re: You can always do less
#5"For every 1 day estimates of a task, there’s a simpler version of that you can do in 3 hours, and an even simpler still you can do in 30 minutes. Back yourself into a corner and these versions will vividly appear before your eye. You can always do less." I wonder if this was the reasoning behind 37s' storing passwords in plaintext instead of taking an extra 10 minutes to write the code to encrypt them?
Evidence?
Re: You can always do less
#6The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less. See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...
My take on it is that they didn't wait until all of those features were completed to release a product, they hacked through the core functionality within the smallest time frame that they could. You can always "do more" later, if more is a nice to have.
Re: You can always do less
#7"For every 1 day estimates of a task, there’s a simpler version of that you can do in 3 hours, and an even simpler still you can do in 30 minutes. Back yourself into a corner and these versions will vividly appear before your eye. You can always do less." I wonder if this was the reasoning behind 37s' storing passwords in plaintext instead of taking an extra 10 minutes to write the code to encrypt them?
Evidence?
Re: You can always do less
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evidence?
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/can-you-trust-37signals-with...
This is from May, and 37signals just made a fairly large change to their authentication system (I think its called Launchpad). Their password recovery system now works differently than described in this post, so I doubt they're still storing them plaintext (thank goodness).
Re: You can always do less
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/can-you-trust-37signals-with...
This is from May, and 37signals just made a fairly large change to their authentication system (I think its called Launchpad). Their password recovery system now works differently than described in this post, so I doubt they're still storing them plaintext (thank goodness).
Yeah, however the point stands that it proves they are willing to act this way about things that are too important to treat said way.
Goes to show even good advice can be taken too far.
Re: You can always do less
#10The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less. See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...
Agreed. This is a nice doctrine to follow for an alpha release or a prototype/demo to shop around for investors, but ALL software used daily in the "real-world" grows in complexity over time.
This axiom holds true in everything from cardiac pacemaker micro-code ( http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5843138.html ), space shuttle avionics ( http://tinyurl.com/475kyv ), or my favorite current example of real-world purposeful constraint, SQLite ( http://www.sqlite.org/version3.html ).