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Discussion on: Ah, to be the Justin Bieber of Open Source

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nestedsoftware profile image
Nested Software • Edited

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about what makes a piece of software successful. We both agreed that at the end of the day, it's rare for software to succeed or fail because of the technology. Often projects succeed in spite of bad or mediocre technology, and once they become successful, they can hire top notch experts to fix the problems they started out with. When they fail, it's usually for a variety of reasons around business and project management.

I'm not saying the dev.to code is bad. I just think that comment about "standard rails mess" is a bit silly. What matters is the end-user experience, and that usually works great for me here. I think the team at dev.to has also done a really good job of promoting a positive, inclusive, and friendly vibe.

It's always better to have a real product that people can use than to fetishize some abstract notion of code purity.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Well to make a sports analogy, the ideal "interception rate" to optimize for a quarterback is not zero. Interceptions are bad, but shooting for perfection would lead to a sort of conservatism that would not feed the end goal. "Many" is also a terrible rate. "Few" is the ideal place to be.