undefined

points

[-]

"The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."

- Fred Brooks, 'The Mythical Man Month' (1975)

by ralferoo1 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Oh wow, it's from Mythical Man Month? I've been meaning to read that for years and still never have.

by didgeoridoo1 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

That and Brooks’ underrated “The Design of Design” are notable for having an almost impossible density of quotable aphorisms on every page. They’re all so relevant today that it’s hard to believe that he’s talking about problems he faced half a century ago.

by shimman1 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Never heard of "The Design of Design" but I bought it off this comment chain.

I think our industry would do a lot to take a moment and breath to understand what we have collectively done since inception. Wonder often if we will look at the highly corporatized influence our industry has had during our time as the dark ages 1000s of years into the future. The idea that private enterprise should shape the direction of our industry is deeply problematic, there needs to be public option and I doubt many devs would disagree.

by allenu1 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

I definitely encountered this second-system effect recently. I have an app that works well because it was written to target a specific use case. User (and I) wanted some additional features, but the original architecture just couldn't handle these new features, so I had to do a rewrite from the ground up.

As I rewrote it, I started pulling in more "nice to haves" or else opening up the design for the potential to support more and more future features. I eventually got to a point where it became unwieldy as it had too many open-ended architectural decisions and a lot of bloat.

I ended up scrapping this v2 before releasing it and worked on a v3 but with a more focused architecture, having some things open-ended but choosing not to pursue them yet as I knew that would just introduce unneeded bloat.

I was quite aware of the second-system effect when doing all this, but I still succumbed to it. Thankfully, the v3 rewrite didn't take as long since I was able to incorporate a lot of the v2 design decisions but scaled some of them back.

by hinkley1 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

My adaptation of the Version 2 Problem is “any idiot can ship version 1 of a product, but it takes skill to ship version 2”.

Usually levied at people who are so hyper focused on shipping a so-called MVP that is really demoware that they are driving us at a brick wall and commenting the entire way about what good time we are making.

by basket_horse1 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

This has been my experience exactly. V1 was custom built for a single client and they loved it. As we tried to expand to multiple clients the v1 was too narrowly scoped (both in UX and code architecture) so we did a full rewrite attempting to generalize the app across more workflows. V2 definitely expanded our client pool, but all our large v1 customers absolutely hated it.

We never did a full v3 rewrite, but it took about 4 years and many v3 redesigns of various features to get our legacy customers on board.