Just Say No to feature requests
July 27th, 2006 | Filed under Rapid development, Interface design, Open sourceI’m the Wicked Witch of the West over on the todo.txt mailing list, smacking down feature request after feature request with “No” and “No” and “quite frankly, no.”
Today I said:
Software can only do so much. Ultimately you want a human at the wheel.
I should have worded it differently. Software can do everything. But you don’t want it to. Software should only do so much.
Being a yes-girl, it’s hard for me to say no to people’s earnest ideas, shared in the spirit of helping others. But Torvalds’ and other great open source developers’ genius was in their ability to pinpoint the good ideas and weed out the bad.
In short, good developers are good editors.