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kottke.org posts about Andre Torrez

How to complain about software

Andre Torrez says “complain about the way other people make software by making software”.

Worse is when the the people doing the complaining also make software or web sites or iPhone applications themselves. As visible leaders of the web, I think there are a lot of folks who could do a favor to younger, less experienced people by setting an example of critiquing to raise up rather than critiquing to tear down.

If you’re a well known web or app developer who complains a lot on Twitter about other people’s projects, I am very likely talking about you. You and I both know that there are many reasons why something works a certain way or why something in the backend would affect the way something works on the front-end.

Working on a web app of my own has definitely given me a new appreciation of just how much of the iceberg is unknown to the users of an app. (via โ˜…buzz)


On weekend web apps

Andre Torrez offers some advice for those who think that they can clone a popular web app over the weekend. The best part โ€” or the worst, if you’re the aspiring weekend programmer โ€” is that each item on the list is a little Pandora’s box of Alice’s rabbit holes. Like this:

Lost password flow. You’ll want to generate a key and store it someplace for when someone requests to reset their password. So that’s another email that has to go out.

If you actually want your email to arrive at its destination, you’re gonna have to worry about all this. Or go through a third-party service, which is another interface (and bill (and moving part)) that you need to worry about. You get the point…making a web app work for more than just one person is hard, way harder than it looks unless you’ve done it.