"Good enough" is good enough

Posted Jul 4, 2013 6:02 UTC (Thu) by geertj (guest, #4116)
Parent article: "Good enough" is good enough

I have seen Alex' "Good Enough" talk at PyCon 2013. It was inspiring, and it has made a difference to me on how I develop software. I'm not sure if there's a video somewhere but if there is I'd highly recommend it.

"Good enough" is good enough

Posted Jul 8, 2013 14:58 UTC (Mon) by kjp (guest, #39639) [Link]

I agree. I specifically remember his example of 'worse is better' where he talked about unix punting retry of system calls (e.g. on SIGINT) to user space, instead of putting complexity in the kernel.

A month after I watched that talk, I used that same philosophy in building a s3 cache daemon - it did no retries itself, instead clients of it had to handle retry - and doing it that way was awesome, as you can then restart the cache daemon at will and know things won't break. (I was writing the client side too so I could add the retry there easily).