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Mark Stockley Thanks for explaining why Jetpack is delivered the way that it is. Every bit of software is a compromise between different priorities and I understand that everyone is making decisions with the best intentions. What you’re saying, if I understood correctly, is that you can get more done by building Jetpack as a monolith. What I understood Brin to mean, and where I agree with him if he does, is that a monolith is not what I want and the trade-off of delivering more by making development easier is, for me, the wrong emphasis. Every time I’ve worked with Jetpack I’ve had (different) problems and in general it’s made life harder, not easier – much more so than almost any other plugin I’ve used. The reason is that Jetpack works around one dependency problem and creates a whole bunch of different ones instead. I’d rather live with the original problem. Why did my thumbnail image URLs fail yesterday? Because a bit of Jetpack I don’t want, don’t need and didn’t know existed changed them. Why did I have to tell a customer I couldn’t design the social sharing part of the blog pages until we’d already gone live? Because dev mode wouldn’t allow me to switch it on and we couldn’t break their IT dept’s policy by putting the dev site on the public internet. How stupid did I feel when I told their IT dept that their web server needed to maintain a permanent link to, and dependency on, a bunch of servers they don’t maintain in order to provide infinite scrolling? I appreciate that the developers who work on Jetpack are producing something that many, many people find useful and that decisions are taken by smarter people than me for the very best of reasons. I don’t have insight in to all the discussions that take place or compromises that need to be made so this is me simply saying, selfishly, that for this one user Jetpack solves problems that I have but because of the way it solves them I feel compelled to find other solutions.
Mark Stockley
Thanks for explaining why Jetpack is delivered the way that it is. Every bit of software is a compromise between different priorities and I understand that everyone is making decisions with the best intentions. What you’re saying, if I understood correctly, is that you can get more done by building Jetpack as a monolith.
What I understood Brin to mean, and where I agree with him if he does, is that a monolith is not what I want and the trade-off of delivering more by making development easier is, for me, the wrong emphasis.
Every time I’ve worked with Jetpack I’ve had (different) problems and in general it’s made life harder, not easier – much more so than almost any other plugin I’ve used.
The reason is that Jetpack works around one dependency problem and creates a whole bunch of different ones instead. I’d rather live with the original problem.
Why did my thumbnail image URLs fail yesterday? Because a bit of Jetpack I don’t want, don’t need and didn’t know existed changed them.
Why did I have to tell a customer I couldn’t design the social sharing part of the blog pages until we’d already gone live? Because dev mode wouldn’t allow me to switch it on and we couldn’t break their IT dept’s policy by putting the dev site on the public internet.
How stupid did I feel when I told their IT dept that their web server needed to maintain a permanent link to, and dependency on, a bunch of servers they don’t maintain in order to provide infinite scrolling?
I appreciate that the developers who work on Jetpack are producing something that many, many people find useful and that decisions are taken by smarter people than me for the very best of reasons.
I don’t have insight in to all the discussions that take place or compromises that need to be made so this is me simply saying, selfishly, that for this one user Jetpack solves problems that I have but because of the way it solves them I feel compelled to find other solutions.
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