

So Long, Carbonmade: A feature from conception to completion in one day. - sahillavingia
http://spencerfry.com/so-long-carbonmade

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zzzmarcus
When I saw the title of the blog post I thought CarbonMade was shutting down.
Took a few paragraphs to be sure they weren't. If you haven't read it, they
are't. They just added a feature to ask why people are leaving when they close
their accounts.

~~~
spencerfry
Yup. Not shutting down. :)

That's just the verbiage we're using here:

<http://carbonmade.com/goodbye>

That's what the article is referencing.

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StavrosK
I'm not entirely sure that implementing a textbox form in a day is something
to brag about. For comparison, yesterday we added some vital statistics for
historious to the backend (churn, active users, repeat users, etc etc) with
graphs and all in a few hours...

It's great when you're a small startup and you can go "hey, we need a form so
people can give us feedback when they cancel" and then have it ready in a few
minutes, but I don't see it as something extraordinary.

What customers _do_ appreciate, though, is when they send you an email about
some small feature request or bug report and you reply 5 minutes later saying
"thanks for catching that, we just fixed it and it's live". People aren't very
used to getting bugs fixed just by reporting them, and we get some very happy
customers this way.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Let's not be in a hurry to post a contradictory opinion; let's try to
understand what an article is really about and what it's trying to say -- I
don't see how anything other than the most cursory reading of this article
could lead you to the conclusion that it was "bragging about implementing a
textbox form in a day".

Paragraph 1: The introduction; Spencer introduces the topic of the article
(note that "text box" isn't anywhere in this), and why he found it to be
important.

Paragraph 2: Spencer introduces another, secondary topic, where he explains a
common issue encountered by small-but-growing development teams.

Paragraph 3: Spencer explains his approach to handling part of the problems
explained in the previous paragraph. He isn't fully resolving all of the
problems associated with project management, but he's found a particular way
of handling one aspect of it, and he's sharing that with us.

Paragraph 4(ish): He ties the approach outlined in the previous paragraph into
the problem introduced in the first paragraph. Incidentally, this is rarer in
the navel-gazing blogger set: he's introduced two topics of conversation and
tied them together in just 4 short paragraphs. Good stuff!

Paragraphs 5 & 6 start the next section of the article with some exposition.
Eh, OK.

Paragraph 7 is meaty, and explains why they concluded that a standard
selection-type survey wasn't what they wanted.

Paragraph 8 concludes this section with an explanation of their choice of
targets for the exit survey.

The end section here has a little more exposition, in the "author is hanging
out with you" format, along with some examples of early data which support his
supposition way back in the first paragraph that mining the data would be
valuable.

So ... this isn't about implementing a textbox form in a day.

\--

On another note, this sort of thing is a large part of why I personally don't
bother keeping a regular blog. Why the hell should I spend any time writing
something that people are going to piss on without even properly reading it?

Online forums are bad enough, attracting an audience of half-interested know-
it-alls doesn't sound like a fun time.

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markbao
It's interesting to see the move from "we can obviously implement a feature in
a day... probably in an hour" to "impressive to introduce a rather basic
feature but with introspection" — not a bad thing, since while it seems like
the startups are moving slower, the features are being considered with greater
gravity than "shoot, let's just code it and deploy"

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steveklabnik
It's nice to see stories like this, that walk you through the entire process,
even if it's a simple feature. This is pretty much the essence of agile
development, but without the ceremony.

~~~
lukev
With a small team, on a startup where you write your own requirements, agile
is so easy it's impossible _not_ to do.

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mstevens
Interestingly spencerfry.com seems to be blocked by OpenDNS as
"Proxy/anonymizer".

I've experimentally flagged it for review.

