Kartik Agaram
It's not just a matter of deleting features. Any time I innovate a feature even slightly, I find myself doing something I don't have the skills for. I lost the first version of this comment thread, writing it on my Teliva-based editor (which provides character counts for chunks). Fucking stupid bug, and it was all me.
Software benefits from testing. If you use software with few users, it's almost certain to be under-tested.
Kartik Agaram
One thing is clear: the dream/temptation to "scale up" is poison. But it's unclear what's left. We end up with a few people scattered in a humongous state space mostly building stuff for ourselves, nibbling at the margins of the software industrial complex, while unable to actually extricate ourselves from it.
You can have both kinds of software, the kind that's unreliable because the authors are indifferent/malicious or the kind that's unreliable because the authors don't have enough support.
Kartik Agaram
I also can't just ignore all the considerations of industrial software.
I can't just do it from scratch because I don't have all the skills. Deciding what to depend on is also thorny. Pulling in irrelevancies vs excluding people.
5% of software lasts a long time. (Analogy with food breaks down there.) Hard to tell which 5% it is. (Analogy with building roads/bridges breaks down there.)
If I were to ever have any success, I'll be dealing with awkward requests, the risk of burnout.
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