

Aaron Swartz: Sweating the Small Stuff - mattculbreth
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/sweatsmall

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aston
Jottit may end up being the classic example of why striving for perfect code
is a bad idea.

Half a year on a textarea... I hope it turns out to be awesome.

~~~
palish
There's a hidden advantage. When he's done, he's done. He doesn't need to
spend any more time on it once it's basically perfect. But its function will
last as long as there's a server to host it.

So if his next project turns out to be that way, then ten projects thereafter,
pretty soon he's made a suite of applications that a large number of people
find useful.

~~~
edw519
I once did a post-mortem on 700 IT software requests over an 18 month period.
I came to the conclusion that 95% of them were to change THAT WHICH SHOULD
HAVE NEVER BEEN RELEASED. In other words, 10 programmers were kept busy in a
$100 million company FIXING THEIR OWN BUGS. The business wasn't changing so
much to require them; their own incomplete work made them necessary.

Sure, you can work on perfect so hard that you never release anything. OTOH,
there's a lot to be said for high quality work.

~~~
davidw
On the other hand, the history of computer products is littered with "perfect"
systems that lost out to good systems released earlier, and accomplishing most
of what people want.

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JulianMorrison
Usually there was some other complicating factor, like massive over-charging.
Meanwhile better systems have come from behind (Word beats the entrenched but
poorly ported Wordperfect at the DOS/Windows changeover).

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staunch
This post seems like a pretty transparent attempt to justify his
procrastination. It's a really easy trap to fall into. Actually releasing to
the public is like selecting the "Hurt Me Plenty" option in Doom, it's not an
easy thing to do.

My partner and I took turns emailing this quote to each other as a reminder to
keep ourselves intellectually honest:

 _"Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it
makes you work harder. When you're working on something that isn't released,
problems are intriguing. In something that's out there, problems are alarming.
There is a lot more urgency once you release. And I think that's precisely why
people put it off. They know they'll have to work a lot harder once they do."_
\-- Hardest Lessons #1

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webwright
On one hand I think there are kudos to give for bucking the irrationally
extreme "release early, release often" trends that seems to abound. I've seen
a lot of bad software released under this banner.

On the other hand, that's an awful long time for the features I see in a
really crowded market.

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palish
There's a guy posing as PG in the comments. It's pretty malicious too, because
when you click on "PG" it sends you to a web archive of Paul's Infogami blog.

I'm amazed at how much time people devote to making other people look bad.

~~~
rms
Some people just suck. I wonder if it's one of the guys who submit malware
here.

~~~
dfranke
Malware? I haven't seen that, or at least haven't identified it as such, and I
have showdead turned on. What are you referring to?

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rms
A guy submits tv by demand links that try and get you to run a javascript
function or an .msi (scariest extension imaginable) to let you watch videos
online. If you search for tvbydemand malware, it gets you to that guys site
where he reposts press releases about OTHER malware. Shady as hell.

~~~
dfranke
Ah, ok. I've seen lots of those. I didn't realize they were malware, just
spam.

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Readmore
That looks alot like the idea behind my site scrapages. Although I built that
in about 2 weeks.

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axod
Talking up the complexity just doesn't cut it for me with this. It's a simple
little thing. No way are there "500 different things to do". Maybe 500 lines
of _code_ :)

~~~
waleedka
You'll be surprised. As you approach "perfect", the number of details for any
given task increases exponentially. That's why perfect is unattainable.

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brett
How did you manage to post the reddit redirect link? I wonder if reddit still
logs it as a click through when they are not the referrer.

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rms
He saw this post in his recommended links on Reddit and he right clicked,
copied, and submitted here without hesitating.

~~~
mattculbreth
Damn, correct. Didn't even notice I did that.

