

Interview with Instapaper's Marco Arment - filament
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2011/01/25/interview_marco_arment.html

======
frossie
Built something to scratch his own itch, turned it into a ubiquitous service
and still a one-man-shop. What is there not to like?

This:

 _[...] geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-
ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting,
or because they can add massive value if done well [...] These features —
often very easy for people but very hard for computers — often produce
mediocre-at-best results, are never truly finished, and usually require
massive time investments to achieve incremental progress with diminishing
returns._

I've come to believe that the number one thing a user cares about is a smooth,
obvious and consistent workflow, and if you are not giving them that, you
shouldn't be working on anything else.

~~~
brehaut
I think that is exactly his point; if those features (the interestingly
academic or algorithmic but very tricky) are the ones that are most likely to
make the workflow lumpy or weird.

My interpretation (based on the actual text, not the abbreviated quotation) is
that Arment prioritises straight forward user experience over wizbangery

------
parkerny
I don't agree with Rands' framing of Instapaper as a Delicious replacement but
appreciate the interview.

~~~
nickgeiger
Agreed. I just tried instapaper based on this statement. I use delicious for
saving things for reference and tagging them, mostly as an alternative to
bookmarking, particularly for saving obscure stuff that I don't want
cluttering my bookmarks and I may never return to, but I really want to be
able to find again if I have to. Instapaper looks cool, but doesn't seem like
a replacement for that at all.

------
aaronbrethorst
"If a one-person company is going to build a product, it can’t have any of
those huge time-sink features."

"I built Instapaper...with a custom high-performance MVC framework"

I'm confused: how does he square 'use mature tools that are widely used, and
'as a one-person shop, only build one or two features of moderate complexity'
with 'write your own custom web framework and ORM'?

~~~
dareiff
He was talking about "speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation
engines, or natural-language processing".

He got the custom MVC framework for free — they built it for Tumblr, IIRC.

