Anti-capitalist Human Scale Software (and Why It Matters)

Jed steered me towards this Jesse Kriss article - Anti-capitalist human scale software (and why it matters) and I can't thank him enough for it. Aside from the somewhat scary headline, it's a great read about making sure to put people as your bottom line. The simple example of that is Twitter pushing out a feature that is destructive to the way people use the service. The more intense example is Apple refusing to bust their encryption. People should be at the core of good decision making, not just pleasing investories and juicing the numbers (I realize these are important but if you can please users, the others will likely follow).

I particularly loved this bit entitled Scale is a trap.

So much of the complexity of web engineering comes from questions of scale. But why do we need scale? If we are trying to build humane software, there are significant benefits to keeping things smaller and simpler. If you want to run something for hundreds of people - or even thousands - that is entirely sustainable on a single cheap shared server.

I can personally attest to finding massive success with smaller groups of users. Whiskerino grew to a scale of just 500 users and that was plenty. In fact, growing beyond that was a large reason to not continue it. The intimacy would have been lost.

I realize much of this is aspirational and not entirely practical but it's a good mindset to ponder and gravitate towards when decision making.