Creating "Consensus, Cucumber, and Change"

[steveklabnik]

_Don't merge this yet_

This is mostly just for me to work on over the next day or so.

[steveklabnik]

First draft of this post is done, obviously waiting until the specs are actually finished. @jkwade @matin @mahmoudimus what do you think? Is this too harsh on Facebook?

[matin]

That means, according to conventional startup wisdom, that our motto should be "Move fast and break things." I personally think that this is one of the worst pieces of advice that a startup can follow.

I actually think that's reasonable advice for a start-up ... if you're not doing anything with money or commerce.

As you also pointed out, this maxim also doesn't hold if you have others depending on you as a platform.

[steveklabnik]

That may be a good point. I still am very troubled by the amount of extra work that we're forced to do by implementing things over and over and over just because someone didn't want to maintain an interface.

[matin]

The general sentiment is right though. One startup follows a philosophy that works or has worked for them, and others follow it in a cargo cult mentality.

Even with non-commerce consumer apps, there's a much higher standard nowadays with quality online and on mobile. It used to be acceptable to have slow buggy pages. That's no longer the case in 2013.

In other words, "move fast and break things" worked at one point and continued to work for marketing, but expectations have changed.

[mahmoudimus]

This is a solid post. You don't mention versioning here or how we're engineering our API for revisions going forward, though -- is that intentional?

[steveklabnik]

In other words, "move fast and break things" worked at one point and continued to work for marketing, but expectations have changed.

This is a really good insight. Hmm..

You don't mention versioning here or how we're engineering our API for revisions going forward, though -- is that intentional?

I wasn't sure how long this was actually getting, so I just kept it pretty high level. I've been meaning to personally blog about versioning for a while, as it's a huge topic, so I figure elaborating might make sense later. I'm not opposed to talking about it a bit here, though.

[steveklabnik]

We'll also need a picture for this now. /cc @dmdj03

[mjallday]

Dictator with a cucumber for a baton?

[steveklabnik]

Not exactly needed for now.