

Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep (2011) - scott_s
http://royrapoport.blogspot.com/2011/05/coffee-and-its-effects-on-feature-creep.html

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cms07
I'm not sure how much it really says about feature creep. I mean, sure,
features increased, but it was really more about how the people used it than
anything.

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royrapoport
Speaking as the guy who wrote Caffeinator ...

You can look at it in (at least) two ways: On one hand, the rapid feature
implementation on Caffeinator was a natural (and predictable) outcome of
having a project where the person working on it was passionate about the
project and its impact. On the other hand, it's worth noting that I probably
saved us a whole 5-10 minutes on each coordinated coffee trip at the cost of
hours and hours of (admittedly extra-curricular -- much like a current project
I own at Netflix, at the time Caffeinator was explicitly not what I was
getting paid to work on) work. It's quite likely I could have invested some of
that time in other projects I was just as passionate about which may have been
more relevant to the business (but, well, I didn't and I'm OK with that).

That said, I'd argue the debt tracking system built into Caffeinator was a
totally unnecessary bolt-on that made it unnecessarily complex. If I had it to
do over again, I'd have kept Caffeinator purely coffee-based (which means, for
example, less concern around authentication and validation because we didn't
have a big potential for someone to play a practical joke by ordering someone
else a drink) and created some other system for tracking debt and
transactions. Call it some catchy name like "Bitcoin"[0] or something and ship
it.

[0] :)

