The Mythical Man Weekend
The "I can do it in a weekend" beast reared its naive head on Hacker News recently which in turn generated some intelligent discussion on the topic. We've all been there and we've all learned the hard way. It's amusing to watch others step on that rake as you once did. The topic touched a nerve for me. We are building ClickDeck360 to help developers and PMs avoid the clusterfuck involved in building products. We hope that silly ideas like "I can do that in a weekend" get analyzed, discussed and tested out before a line of code is even written. We hope that people spend their weekends with family instead of working because someone said "Oh that, that's a 4 hour feature".
Let's run through a quick exercise:
Initial comment: "I can build StackOverflow in a weekend."
Oh really? Draw it for me, on a napkin.
Whatcha got there?
"Questions, each one with a vote count and some answers. Timestamp, username, number of answers."
Ok, maybe you can pull that off in a weekend... Oh so do people have to log in to ask these questions and vote?
"Yes."
Ok, so let's add a login system in here. Don't forget the password reminder mechanism and the emails. What about the edge cases? You know when someone tries to vote but they are not logged in? What's the flow there? Ok let's spec that out too. Are you going to code it from scratch? No? You'll use Django's password system? Ok, so will you be spending some time integrating that?
Ok. Now it's good. Wait, how's search going to work? Do we index every word? How about tags? Ok, let's do tags. So the author will tag the question. Edge case alert: can tags have spaces? What happens if the author types in the same tag twice? Do we parse out duplicates from the tag list? What happens when the user clicks on a tag? Do we resort the results page? What order?
How about nesting? Can I respond to a commenter? How many levels of nesting? How will the UI handle that? Will it be too hard to navigate? Ok, then should we just leave comments on each response in a flat list?
Really, I'm just scratching the surface here and asking the questions that first come to mind. But I'll ask again: does this look like a "weekend's worth" of work, or a weekend's worth of questions?
