This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details

ok… jeff, i have to know. i have the same goddamned feeder, and my big pet peeve is that the minimum feed serving was still too big for my really fat cat. did they make a smaller portion size this time around?

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Stanley Kubrick likes this.

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I stumbled into actually reading your blog a few weeks ago and have been browsing. Nice work.

I laughed at “… continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis …”. You need a special section for QuickBooks, the worst commercial software in the universes.

Anyway, back in the day, 1972 to be exact, my professor of computing science taught me that the only part of software creation that was not clerical was design of the human interface. I think that’s roughly equivalent or perhaps complementary,to what you say in this article and it has stuck with me through 10 years of programming, a 20 year side trip as a lawyer, and now back to coding, just for fun.

Just now I wandered through your post on the 2 classes of programmers. Some days I’m in the 80% some days in the 20%, but I’ll tell you one reason why the 80 percenters often ignore the 20 percenters, and sometimes loathe them - they do not pay attention to the interface.

When an 20 percenter wants me to try code which is written to his personal standards, complete with weird stuff assigned to function keys and the right mouse button, input controls in non-standard areas, or god help me, ‘command line options’, I say no thank you please, call me when some other sucker has spent 2000 hours sorting this out.

And I still press f2 in QuickBooks when I want to edit something, and get some wanky QuickBooks thingy, and curse.

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Jeff, you can’t be serious - StackOverflow still does not have e-mail notification system in place.
This is a feeder only a very desperate cat would ever use…

I had always thought that it were dogs the ones that can’t control their appetite. At least in Spain, we just refill the cat’s bowl when it’s almost empty.

my professor of computing science taught me that the only part of software creation that was not clerical was design of the human interface

Ah, to be a developer in the days before multithreading and the joys of concurrency issues! :slight_smile:

We never changed the actual feed schedule, but just changing the time for daylight savings was so incredibly awkward…

Imposing daylight savings on your pets!? Does it not amount to pet abuse? Lol!

I still wonder why you’d want to change the times for daylight savings. Cats are pretty versatile creatures. Just because we change our clocks, they don’t wake you up one hour early for their breakfast, and they certainly don’t feel hungry earlier or later. :slight_smile:

Did you just start changing the schedule like you change the time on other clocks, or did you give this some thought? :stuck_out_tongue:

I agree with all this, but as you said, Stack Overflow started simple, without even the ability to add comments. You can’t manage and incorporate all the fine details from day one. You have to start simple and get feedback from your users and then improve as you go along. A lot of developers and development companies, try to wedge all the details in from day one, without feedback from their users. They think they can figure it all out themselves.

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@Teamsiems: I came to post that link, so I was happy to see someone got there ahead of me.

@Jeff: “When I ordered the new feeders, I assumed they would be a little better than what I had before.”

I thought for sure the next sentence was going to be “But they weren’t. In fact they were worse.” or something like that. I was happy to see that there were a bunch of improvements!

@Msterex and others: “I still wonder why you’d want to change the times for daylight savings.”

My reading of that was that he updated the displayed time just for sanity’s purposes (so you don’t have that one clock that’s an hour off…) but kept the “real time” feedings the same.

I could, of course, be wrong.

You really missed something with the original design…

One of the problems with our pets is that they get board and fat. There’s very little reason to do any exertion in your life when your food magically appears in a bowl and your sexual needs …has… …uh… …been “taken care of” on a more or less permanent basis.

Your cats figured out that they could kibble themselves with a little pawing and stretching in the old feeders. Imagine if you didn’t program the feeder at all. Instead, if your cats wanted food, they would have to “hunt” it down themselves by pawing at it through the feeder. They’ll get exercise and their life will be that much more exciting.

Not entirely tongue-in-cheek. When Gus, the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo was diagnosed with depression, one of the things the zoo keepers did was freeze his food in blocks of ice. Now, in order to get the food, Gus had to break through the ice by biting on it and tossing it around. The bear’s mood picked up and he was no longer depressed.

Maybe he adjusts feeder to daylight saving time because he or sombody else wants to play on normal time with happy, feeded cats?

Qazwart, one of my cats would benefit from your idea. He gets bored with his food BUT if you throw the pieces of kibble for him to chase, he adores it and will eat as many as you throw. He enjoys ‘the chase’ and I presume part of the reason is he’s really intelligent for a cat. He learns tricks (like a dog!) really quickly and needs a bit of mental stimulation to keep him happy.

Love this post and I need to buy a pet feeder now! :wink:

During the cat feeder development cycle, the little details didn’t matter until v2.0 though. They had a complete release that sold pretty well, even though it still had a lot of bugs to fix.

Get something that works before you get something that’s pretty!

The feed hopper is funnel shaped. The old feed hopper was a simple cylinder, and holds less in the same space as a result.

Unless the new one was more than 3 times as tall as the old one … I wonder how that is … http://www.analyzemath.com/Geometry_calculators/cone_1.gif

From a Jason Fried interview, when he tells how people describe Basecamp:

All those things that are built into the product. Basecamp does a really good job of handling those things for [the clients], but they never said Basecamp allows us to manage our projects better or anything like that. It wasn’t about that so much for [the clients], it was about all the little small things that add up to make Basecamp a tool that they depend on.

Jason Fried on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio | Jobs-to-be-Done

That’s why every company should have a Chief Detail Officer.
Clearly by default every goes wrong unless a lot of energy is put into making sure things go smoothly.
If you look at a toddler in a room, you realize that for some reason they will naturally be attracted to do the messiest or most dangerous thing… unless a carer/parent is preventing them to do so…
It’s the same for products. I look at it as the Moore’s law of usability…
When something just works and you don’t even notice you’re using a product, it is so delighting. But 99% of the time, things just kind of work and you’re left frustrated. How many times have you washed your hands in a public bathroom only to realize the hands blow dryer is broken. Things mostly kind of work because it takes 20% of the effort to make things kind of work, and 80% of the effort to make them just work.
Is having a CDO the solution?

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It’s kind of interesting that 10 years later, there are so many automated cat feeders that work quite well, and have addressed most (all?) of the issues I raised in the blog post. This tangible progress is even captured in my Amazon purchase history:

2007 → 2012 → 2020, each time the automated feeder got better. I’ve had absolutely no issues with the latest one, it has worked quite reliably.

(Have I mentioned how much I dislike the way eBay throws away all your account purchase history, whereas I can look up purchases all the way back to 1999 on Amazon? This kind of history is useful, as you can see above! :point_up_2:)

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