Kill Your Darlings

This might be just me, but I feel like it as it has become easier and easier to create software, the quality of software has become worse and worse. I think it ties into the tip “Kill Your Darlings” that is given to start ups.

The thing is, if you’re a big corporation and you have thousands of developers that needs something to do, there is a pull towards just creating. And unlike before creating is now fast, so let’s do it.

Let me give some examples. I live in Germany, but I’m not German. I’ve found recently that more and more services are “smart” towards me. They automatically give me all content in German. Sometimes they continue to do so even if I actively change the language on the web page. It seems like a smart feature, but trust me, I did not ask for it.

Then I created an Azure account today. Whatever resource I wanted to create I was presented with a big “Welcome” banner with useful links I could click to learn more. The problem is that this banner popped up, but the screen I wanted, like for example create key vault did not. Closing the banner sent me back to the home page. Finally I found that doing a hard refresh on the page allowed me to finally go about my day to day business.

Then Azure again. Today of course you allow themes on your web pages, I’m a big fan of dark theme. Looks nice. The problem is that some pages evidentally have set the text color explicitly to black and don’t care about the theme. So you get black text on a dark grey background.

I’m a believer in simple is king. I hope software development will move back towards focusing on key problems that needs to be solved.