The $40,000 date picker that nobody wanted
Have a laugh at my expense and learn something with me.
As engineers, we must understand that the work we undertake costs real money, and the unless it is valuable to our customers then it is just vanity!
A good product development process is there to ensure that time spent on development is money WELL spent, that it is valuable to your customers, well thought out and just enough effort at just the right time.
Please learn from our mistakes and take a look at our date picker — it only cost about $40,000 to implement…
https://medium.com/@the_best_greg/the-40-000-date-picker-that-nobody-wanted-f3193da971f7
To be fair every single Fortune 500 company would probably benefit from spending 50k per year to license a Date Picker rather than having developers waste months hacking up third-party libraries with unmaintainable code. But of course no Fortune 500 company is actually going to do that.
<input type="date">🤦♂️😂This is my checklist
If it passes all those requirements, I will put about 70% of my efforts into programming until it is complete.
That is a very clear well thought out list, have you seen a direct benefit to having this so clearly defined?
i.e. have you been burnt before and this has fixed those issues?
Sure! I have been made mistakes which lead to hours upon hours wasted - it is why the list had to be created, but that is how I learned, so I don't mind. All part of the process.
Really good example of how that old saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" is doubly true in software development.
I have a bone to pick with this statement though: "product development process is there to ensure that time spent on development is money WELL spent." In my experience working for companies that can blow $40K without going out of business, the product development process is really there to make sure that the business stakeholders get what they want, not necessarily the end customer. So even a well run development process can end up producing nothing of marketable value in the long run.
As a developer I feel so identify with that guy xD
As a maker, I have learnt to fight my instinct for perfectionism...
If you do a date picker right. And I mean really right. I think you can make $40k from it.
Building date pickers (esp. customizable, international, integratable, translatable, mobile-friendly and bug free) is something that I'd pay for.
Obviously it was a bad decision but I am curious to know how you calculated the development price $40k? Was it a team working on the date picker? 🤨
P.S. Here is a free date (time) picker: https://wireddots.metalogicssoft.com/components/datetimepicker/
Feature creep? Preach it! 🙋🏻
I had to learn to say no to stakeholders and keep sprint schedules to not go too far off the rails.
Scariest is when the feature creep comes from the developers, no customer or business requirements, "I think I might just rewrite this PHP app into Ruby, it will only take a few days" - gulp
Ouch. That’s some serious free reign.
Can’t tell you how long it took to implement holiday logic for some apps. Don’t even mention leap years and daylight savings time. Looking at you Arizona. 👀
Had a laugh - at your expense of course.
Tangentially, the Angular 6 date picker is not internationalized but I'm going to wait for an upstream fix instead of trying to fix it myself.
dates man, honestly you think it would be easier ;D
One of those surprisingly difficult things that you never realise just how horrible it is until you see it
Haha! I've never thought dates were easy. Frontend or back. Timezones, internationalization, mobile, desktop. Even Java back in the day had multiple date/time APIs in the early years.