The author emphasizes the importance of the "move fast and break things" approach, which encourages shipping products quickly, but believes it is often underrated and overlooked outside the tech industry. They argue that this approach forces simplicity and minimalism, which can lead to stripping out valuable features and neglecting important aspects like code refactoring. They discuss examples of companies that took ambitious and unconventional approaches to create outstanding products.
The first example is 280 North, a team of Apple alums who created 280 Slides, a web-based presentation tool that rivaled native applications in terms of performance and aesthetics. They achieved this by designing a new programming language called Objective-J and rewriting OS X's Cocoa library to build a suite of tools for web applications.
Figma, a design tool, is another example. They developed a full graphics editing tool in the browser by implementing underlying graphics rendering technologies using WebGL and creating a programming language to optimize it. They also implemented a realtime change management system for collaboration.
The Browser Company is highlighted as a recent example of ambitious technologists. They built Arc, a reimagined web browser, and took the audacious step of writing a Swift compiler for Windows to ensure performance, security, and native UI. This decision required tackling technical challenges and investing in a team to port the Swift tooling to Windows.
Superhuman, a power-user email client, and Zed, a high-performance code editor, are mentioned for their dedication to quality and their willingness to go beyond what is commonly done. Superhuman created their own CSS layouting framework to achieve typography precision, while Zed built a GPU-powered graphics library instead of relying on existing platforms like Electron.
The author concludes by acknowledging that the move-fast-and-break-things approach is generally good advice, but there are cases where it stifles progress and incremental thinking. They argue that being an ambitious technologist can lead to remarkable achievements, even if commercial success is not guaranteed. The goal should be to create something exceptional and be proud of it, rather than solely focusing on quick market delivery.
All good points, thank you - your distinction between iterate-to-build vs iterate-to-ship is an important one, and something that was in the back of my mind when I was writing. I actually had a section on Stripe that argued that Stripe "do one thing extremely well" rather than "do lots of things poorly", but it didn't have a clear instance of a major technological breakthrough, so I cut it.
The goal here was not to argue that one OUGHT to take ages to ship - I hope I made that clear in the final section – but that there are certain types of ambitious technological visions that NEED a lot of technically risky work to achieve. And so many people shy away from these visions because they feel like they need to ship immediately!
Something practical that helped me – I'm taking a year off drinking, and am 328 days through – was getting my friends and family to take bets heavily skewed against me. If I don't drink for a year, for instance, my friend is giving me $50; if I fail, I am giving her $150.
When I've really wanted a drink, I have to ask myself: is this drink worth ~$3,000? It never is.
I've also been doing lots of gym workouts and going for runs. Seeing my progress after a few months of sobriety has been extremely helpful. I didn't realise I could be athletic – and it was always _much_ harder with a hangover.
Finally, there are now lots of decent alcohol-free drinks available that make sobriety less boring. Athletic Brewery and Lucky Saint are particularly good facsimiles. And a tonic water with a splash of cocktail bitters is delicious!
Rails is a great, progressive framework and I've learnt a lot about programming in general by taking the time to familiarise myself and work with it. Rails makes it very easy to write thoughtful, elegant code. But that's not to say that it's impossible or even difficult to do with CodeIgniter.
All the above links are drag-and-drop solutions and take moments to download, configure and understand.
You will learn a lot about a whole different kind of writing applications when you learn Rails. But the same is true for Python/Django, the same is true for functional programming languages such as Clojure and the same is true for Objective-C and the iPhone SDK.
CodeIgniter is incredibly flexible and that's probably exactly why you use it. Taking a bit of time to interact with the community and see what gems are out there will let you write much better CI code, and a lot of the time you'll find you don't need or want Rails.
The reason why everyone's having this problem is because I only released 20 coupons, which were used pretty quickly. I've released 20 more - they should work now!
Hello, thanks for the feedback. We've decide to go with the credit system because it means that we can charge less for shorter, more concise screencasts and it's less confusing for users. Consumers are aware of and understand credits because many services implement them - the Xbox Live system is a great example of this.
You can also head over to the about page ( http://binarycake.com/about ) and see a list of credit bundles you can buy and the costs.
I reach for it several times per week. Never struggle finding what I want, nor getting it into the shape I want it.