Comment by capableweb
6 years ago
> It annoys me as well, and I think the intent is that "just build the product" is about avoiding shaving the yak.
I think discussions in general on Hacker News, blogposts and Twitter is missing context. Everyone assumes that others context is the same that you yourself has. So posts like this make sense, if you're in "startup - lets find market fit - need growth - just build the damn thing" mode, which is probably the mode the author is, or the context would have been set in the blogpost.
In the comment you're replying to, the context is a "explore an idea and learn something new" with no intention on turning that very thing into a product that sells to people. Maybe that will happen, but it's not the intention.
In the end, two very different contexts, both valid, but they are both talking past each other. All the people using different social networks (HN included), usually miss the vital piece of context and just proclaim "You should do X, because of Y". Then people defend their context, because life is never "Always do X" and will never be.
Good point. But isn't it the author's job to establish context? Otherwise what they're saying is typical "thought leader" platitude nonsense.
Here's another way of looking it. Shipping a product involves thousands of decisions and course corrections. Sometimes technical decisions like deciding on a build system or programming language. Other times product decisions like deciding to ship without user login and use an email "magic link" instead. And other times it involves building no product at all and just gathering some user feedback on the idea.
So if you look at it that way, "just build the product" is total nonsense no matter what context you're in. It's the ability to make good decisions that matters. What's a good decision? One that produces the results you're happy with (expected or not).
How do you make good decisions? Well, that's the hard part. The OP doesn't help at all. It's just fluff.
Example: You're working on a product idea. One of the core features is a DSL/language that the user types in a GUI to make some magical thing happen. Immediately you're faced with choices about your DSL/language. Should it be a subset/superset of another language? Should it be totally custom? Should you write your own parser? Should you use a parser generator? If you use a parser generator, how will you handle lax/incremental parsing?
If it were me I'd spend a couple weeks researching PL theory. In the process I might learn about the tradeoffs of choosing LL/LR/LALR grammars. Maybe I'll learn about state of the art grammar generators that'll save me weeks of coding and months (cumulatively) of debugging. Did I waste my time or did I just greatly improve my core product?
Another week later you're faced with decision of choosing a build system. Since your product will only ever run on AWS somewhere you write a simple Makefile and move forward. No point in diving deep into the likes of CMake/build2/etc if you don't have to. Could it bite you later? Maybe. If it does you'll deal with it.
Where does "just build the product" help here? Building the product is making these decisions thousands of times.
Oh boy, I'm ranting. I'll just press Reply now :P
>How do you make good decisions?
Good decisions come from wisdom. Wisdom comes from making bad decisions. Just make the decisions and learn from that. That's my interpretation of the post.
I sometimes do projects to learn new tools, and sometimes just to try to make something I want to play with. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. But a couple of years later I might come back and revisit it with new knowledge and perspectives.
It's easy to get lost in the labyrinth of second-system syndrome and analysis paralysis and not really do the thing at all. Maybe better to do it with tech debt and sort it out later if it's worth it, and if not then learn from that. But still with a focus on the goals, not the means to get there.
You're so right, it really is talking past each other. That plus having the conversation in a way where we sort of pretend we aren't aware of the varying contexts.