[mixcocam]

"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

- Donald Knuth

Start with a gsheet, when it breaks build something else.

[mbesto]

True story - I know a guy who built an application using Excel for tracking toll charges for car rentals back in the early 2000's. Over time he built out a team and an application. Piece by piece he automated things, but he initially did everything by hand, tracked it in Excel and printed it in PDFs out to his customers for reconciliation.

He sold the business for $400M. No outside capital, he was the only owner.

[Cthulhu_]

Anecdotal, my previous employer had a contract once for a gas storage / exchange, for years their whole business relied on an Excel sheet (basically tracking gas storage transactions from various customers). I don't remember why but they decided to migrate that to a proper application, I think it took a full development team two years to build in all.

But it's likely that, as these things go, they added much more features and visualizations on top instead of just a like-for-like replacement.

TL;DR that company was bootstrapped successfully on just a spreadsheet.

[mixcocam]

Agreed. That is my point. If that company had built the app from the start it would have died building it.

[Pooge]

> Start with a gsheet, when it breaks build something else.

Absolutely don't. The one who built the spreadsheet will have changed companies and the "business logic" and the knowledge will be gone with them. You're now stuck with a blackbox that no ones knows the specs of but everybody depends on.

[asdff]

If the sky doesn't fall the sky doesn't fall. Buddy of mine in sales is using some old DOS software from the 90s to control inventory and quotes. I bet there are absolutely zero people who know how it works in that company today. But, it works.

Turns out when you make relatively simple software, it doesn't really need maintenance. How often do you need to maintain a function like f(x)= mx + b? If it works it works.

[wewtyflakes]

How is that different than an engineer building out a service implementing material business logic then leaving for another job?

[seb1204]

Agree but a company can still have rules for a sheet tool to have e.g. comments, explanations as part of it.

[SaintRomuald]

If you can do something badly and you can do something the right way in the same amount of time, why do it wrong?

[mixcocam]

“Same amount of time”, that’s where you are wrong . Then again, I’m not the one saying Knuth know better than me, maybe not better than you though.