Without maintenance everything is in ruins
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Hello! Marketing and self-promotion are not things that come easy to me; I’d much rather fire up my IDE and spend the morning coding. So aiming to get this newsletter written and sent every week for one year is a good exercise for me. Having said that, I missed writing last week’s newsletter because I was at an industry event in Brighton, UK. I’m trying to go easy on myself, accepting the reality that I can’t do all the things all the time - especially here in the Spanish summer where the school holidays last for 11 weeks(!!!) and I need to fit my daily work into a tight window around my daughter’s half-day school holiday program. Mission: 20 reviewsI’m continuing to contact people I know personally and who bought my book Kill the HiPPO, asking them to write an Amazon review. It’s slow but steady - one by one I’m getting those reviews. You can also write a review here - but preferably only if you actually bought the book, because apparently Amazon only takes those reviews into account. Another review headache is that they seem to be partially segregated by region. 🤷♂️ Without maintenance everything is in ruinsYou buy a house. You live in it for 20 years and never mow the lawn, never paint the walls, never fix a broken window, never repair a leak in the roof. Obviously the house will become unliveable. The same with national infrastructure: roads, bridges, parks, and so on, once built, need regular maintenance to remain useable. The famed Sydney Harbour Bridge has a team of 130 painters, riggers, electricians, fitters and engineers, who work to keep the bridge in good condition. That software has the same need for maintenance seems counterintuitive. It’s just 1s and 0s after all. How can something made of digital bits deteriorate and need fixing? And yet you, as an experienced software creator, have experienced this first hand. And it comes in many ways. It can be because the platform underneath your product changes - think of Apple requiring all iOS apps to be updated from 32-bit to 64-bit, and eventually turning off support for 32 bit apps, or the painful transition from Python 2 to Python 3, or your core web framework receiving a new major version that is not backwards compatible. It can be because the core technology you initially chose loses popularity, making recruitment hard, and causing a dearth of helpful resources. This happened to YouCanBookMe, as told in Kill the HiPPO Chapter 2: Building for “Simon from Canada” and led to a painful rewrite. It can be because third-party integrations with products like Slack or Zapier change the rules. My own experience with this was when we wanted to update the description text of Feature Upvote’s Slack integration, but to do so, we were first required to completely update our integration to a new permissions model. Changing one sentence took days of coding. It can be because design trends change. Kill the HiPPO Chapter 3: “Cupholders vs CarPlay” includes a story of this happening to Less Annoying CRM. Their perfectly functional design hadn’t been updated for some years, and prospective customers thought this meant the product was abandoned: “Existing customers had been perfectly happy with the current design. But to prospective ones, the product looked outdated and unmaintained. They would submit contact forms asking: ‘Are you still working on this? This doesn't look like it's been touched since 2015.’” So Tyler King and his team needed to freshen the design. This, of course, takes time and money, and gets in the way of other things getting done. The irony for me as a non-designer is that afterwards, the product still had exactly the same functionality it had before hand. Most of us build our software using a slew of third-party dependencies that need frequent updating. These are found to have security holes; get rewritten in a way that breaks backward compatibility; are abandoned and have to be replaced with an alternative; or having their licensing terms changed in a way we find financially untenable. It’s so frustrating. As the Red Queen tells Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass: “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” It’s even more frustrating watching a new competitor come along and deploy update after update, while you are spending months doing essential maintenance. Of course, in due time, the competitor will also come to spend substantial resources in ongoing maintenance. But if you don’t spend significant time in maintenance tasks, your software - just like a house or a bridge - will be in ruins. Until next time, Steve McLeod PS: If you’ve bought Kill the HiPPO, have you written a review yet? |