Don't Build Every Feature

There’s a detail about Today I Learned some might find unusual: we never added a way to delete posts from the site. Why ignore a basic CRUD feature? We didn’t ignore it. It was intentionally omitted.

I’ve thought about this decision a lot over the last two years. It’s lasted over many pull requests, issues, forks, and discussions. I addressed it directly in a Github issue not long ago.

Preventing deletes was a hack to make Today I Learned feel permanent. If the goal of the site was to show the world what we at Hashrocket are learning, why allow people to self-censor that journey? The temptation to obsess over your output until it’s a flawless diamond of competence is too great, especially among high-performing programmers.

As a Hashrocket apprentice, I was certain that my pride would push me to go back and delete my old posts. To present a facade to the world that I arrived fully-formed where I am today, without ever learning something trivial the hard way, and building on that.

There’s too much magic in software. I am proud that our site exposes the winding journeys we all take.

Don’t try to build every feature you can imagine, or every feature other applications have. Sometimes an omitted ability can refine the way people think about your product. The things that are missing can be more powerful than all the things that are already there.

• Agile