[clpwn]

I feel like a lot of fantastic software is made by a small number of people whose explicit culture is a mix of abnormally strong opinionatedness plus the dedication to execute on that by developing the tools and flow that feel just right.

Much like a lot of other "eccentric" artists in other realms, that eccentricity is, at least in part, a bravery of knowing what one wants and making that a reality, usually with compromises that others might not be comfortable making (efficiency, time, social interaction from a larger group, etc).

[awesomegoat_com]

Totally agree.

It is just allowing human element that creates quality craft.

When you are following the best practices, you remove that human element (hyperbole, I know).

When you force certain rules, jiras, stand-up, you increase predictability, but the cost is the lower quality, lower happiness and higher attrition.

[chasil]

SQLite's quality is due to the DO-178B compliance that has been achieved with "test harness 3" (TH3).

Dr. Hipp's efforts to perfect TH3 likely did lower his happiness, but all the Android users stopped reporting bugs.

"The 100% MCD tests, that’s called TH3. That’s proprietary. I had the idea that we would sell those tests to avionics manufacturers and make money that way. We’ve sold exactly zero copies of that so that didn’t really work out... We crashed Oracle, including commercial versions of Oracle. We crashed DB2. Anything we could get our hands on, we tried it and we managed to crash it... I was just getting so tired of this because with this sort of thing, it’s the old joke of, you get 95% of the functionality with the first 95% of your budget, and the last 5% on the second 95% of your budget. It’s kind of the same thing. It’s pretty easy to get up to 90 or 95% test coverage. Getting that last 5% is really, really hard and it took about a year for me to get there, but once we got to that point, we stopped getting bug reports from Android."

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

[chousuke]

it's not that "best practices" or any of those things are what causes trouble; it's failing to recognize that they're just tools, and people will still be the ones doing the work. And people should never be treated as merely tools.

You can use all of those things as to enable people to do things better and with less friction, but you also need to keep in mind that if a tool becomes more of a hindrance than a help, you should go looking for a new one.

[Beltalowda]

I don't think you need "abnormally strong opinionatedness" or anything else special: all you need is a certain (long-term) dedication to the project and willingness to just put in the work.

Almost every project is an exercise in trade-offs; including every possible feature is almost always impossible, and never mind that it's the (usually small) group of core devs who need to actually maintain all those features.

[tobyjsullivan]

I interpreted "opinionatedness" as meaning they have a clear definition of what sqlite is and isn't, including the vision of where it's headed. That would result in a team with very strong opinions about which changes and implementations are a good or bad fit for sqlite.

Can a project consistently make the right trade-offs without having strong opinions like that?

[_the_inflator]

I see these informations especially in light of the theory of constraints when working on a platform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

These devs provide a platform and any change to a platform has a huge impact for the users. They have a plan they follow, and in every project are layers. Constraints can be good, when and if applied correctly like in this case.