[gb] Studio

The more parts of the project you can influence with your skills, the more you are able to [innovate].

I believe it’s partially the developer’s fault as well. Maybe, in this 20 years of engineering championing, we pushed too hard on the designer or the writer. It’s like at colleges where the liberal arts don’t hold as much weight as a bachelor of sciences. That sort of thinking has persisted through careers. Perhaps we’ve backed all of you into a corner and you’re pissed at us because Google has 47 blues tested. I get it.

The real lesson for me is this: People want the basics done well. Does it look good, does it feel good, is it comfortable, is it clear, is it easy? No matter what you’re selling, those seem to be the things that really matter. Get those right and you’ve got a great shot at building a successful product and business.

These black and white arguments don’t hold water. The idea that there are three simple levers that define a feature or a product is passive-aggressive professional absurdity. There are myriad levers the team can adjust, but to understand them you need to understand the people who are actually building the software.

Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write the body of the function… And your eyes are swimming, and you have no friggin’ idea what this frigtard is talking about, but he just won’t go away…

And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”

When I look back at all my startup experiences…, every single one of them could have been shipped much sooner… By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.

There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly. This is why as a UX designer you need a good understanding of what it takes to implement a feature before you nod your head and write another bullet point.

Filling little gaps in another company’s product lineup is snatching nickels from the path of an oncoming steam roller.

You can deliver the base first, then the filling, and finally the icing. At the end of the last phase you have a consumable cake. Alternatively you can make a cupcake, then step up to a normal cake, and eventually a wedding cake. The difference here is that people enjoy cupcakes.

I have now between five and ten newly empty hours a day, and the things I pushed away—seeing friends, writing fiction, eating off of plates—don’t return naturally. The project is gone, taking with it the nearly monastic order it gave to life. In its place there is: one, the need for praise…, two, the sense of failure (all those problems left unsolved, all the rough edges and clutter that you couldn’t distill to simplicity), and three, the sudden awareness of insignificance (all you have done is to turn on another blinking screen among the blinking billions in the media night sky).

The thing that’s so wonderful about using beautiful, appropriate tools is that they become an extension of you, your body, you fingertips, and your mind. They get out of the way and let you directly interact with the problem you are solving. Everyone’s tried to remove a screw without a screwdriver; a task quickly becomes impossible that otherwise would be trivial.

SAP, the world’s biggest maker of business-management software, took almost three years to implement the system instead of one year, while costs “ballooned” to $36 million from a projected maximum of $10 million, Shane said in papers filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Denver.

I wrote Capistrano for me. I didn’t write it to have lots of users. I
didn’t write it to be a popular solution to a problem. I wrote it to
scratch my itch… I’m burning out because suddenly I’m feeling an obligation to keep
everyone happy…

Something has to give. In this case (and among other things), it’s
Windows. Microsoft may be an 800lb gorilla, but it’s not my gorilla,
and it’s not in my room. If you need to appease the gorilla, that is
(with all due respect) not my problem.

The iPhone also made me see tons of flaws in the software I’ve created – the biggest being that I’ve tried to please power users by making too many non-essential details configurable, and doing so in a way that intimidates new users. I mistook complexity for power, and that wasn’t smart.