Better yet, what if we locked the feature set early (TeX-style) to keep these libraries from sprawling into other domains to which they don’t belong?Shortcuts/magic remove clear affordances for the uninitiated, what if we wrote tools that adhered to KISS and were well-documented?Platforms that are not web-aware make it difficult to tie into the larger ecosystem of tools, what if we wrote hosted services with clear APIs that other services can interface with?Monolithic code-bases are large and unwieldy, what if we had separate repositories, one for each self-contained thing?Publishing can be a complex activity requiring specialists, many interteam dependencies, and hours or days of manual testing.
What if every software project had the mentality that anyone should be able to deploy code at any time, with the duration measured in minutes?Different devices, form-factors, operating systems, and SDKs make it difficult to write cross-platform code.
What if we supported standards committees (e.
g.
W3C) and used the standards they write (e.
g.
HTML5) rather than reinventing the wheel a hundred times?Infinite flexibility makes new tools difficult to learn.
What if we set a goal of 10 minutes for people to achieve some level of expertise with the tool, and built constraints into the tool accordingly?Lack of time keeps many people from aquiring the prerequite skills needed to solve a software problem.
What if we built tools that a person with nothing but an app idea could use.
We have enough tools built for senior developers who have already written a hundred apps.
Overpromising and underdelivering makes software development seem hard and esoteric.
What if we scoped our releases rigorously, and consistently released updates on a weekly basis?.What if we addressed technical debt up front to avoid six month rewrites of our entire code base?In a future where products and services outlive the businesses that founded them, will future-proofed design matter more than it does today?.