The Shape of Everything
A website mostly about Mac stuff, written by August "Gus" Mueller
» Acorn
» Retrobatch
» Mastodon
» Micro.blog
» Instagram
» Github
» Maybe Pizza?
» Archives
» Feed
» Micro feed
September 20, 2019

Hillel Wayne: Performance Matters

"It wasn’t even that slow. Something like a quarter-second lag when you opened a dropdown or clicked a button. But it made things so unpleasant that nobody wanted to touch it. Paper was slow and annoying and easy to screw up, but at least it wasn’t that."

James Somers: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

"The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more."

I used to work really fast, but these days not so much. I wish I did though. It's liberating to just throw stuff out there and move around and iterate quickly.

I think the reason I don't work fast anymore is because the code I write and any other actions I take for work cause ripples that effect a whole lot more people now than they did 10 years ago. I have to be conscious of this (at least I assume I do, or should be). But at the same time, it bugs me that I can't just stream ideas out there and iterate without people instantly becoming dependent on these ideas, which might not be fully baked. If I change the behavior of a filter in Acorn is that going to screw someone up? What about a node in Retrobatch which is surely being used in some sort of production environment?

And then I have ideas for apps. Tons of ideas, but which I don't have time or the will to setup a proper website or introduction, and certainly not support. Just fun things that I want to quickly get up and out there. I used to do this all the time!

Maybe I need a skunkworks branch of Flying Meat.