Brent Simmons, developer of the excellent NetNewsWire (my tool for finding all this ephemera), offers his take on the Anatomy of a Feature. If you’re at all curious about the sausage-making process of software development, you might be interested in just how much thought goes into even the most trivial-sounding changes.
I’d kind of shudder to read/write an equivalent essay set inside a big company, where affecting something like one’s own app installer can require petitioning a dozen people–often without success. The phrase “up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about” comes to mind.
Just yesterday I found myself calmly declaring that if getting Future Feature X into PS.next requires slapping down my credit card and building the Web hosting myself*, so be it. (Know this, suckaz: We. Shall. Prevail.)
* Enabling Configurator for CS4 involved my getting a six pack of Negra Modelo and recording each menu item in Photoshop, then copying/pasting/reformatting/commenting the code, one at a time, 800 times over the course of several evenings. Elegant, pleasurable? Not so much. But no one ever said it was gonna be easy.