Posted by mtlynch 11 hours ago
https://refactoringenglish.com/excerpts/write-an-effective-d...
You could approximate it with email, but I want things that you can't do with email like letting recipients control the frequency of emails, making high-res images available without bloating everyone's inboxes.
But I spent five years on a solo app and never wrote anything close to this. Not on principle event, just the design just kept moving. The decisions that ended up mattering weren't ones I could have named on day one, they were things I cut in year three once I actually understood what the app was for. If I'd written the objective sentence up front I'd have locked in a version that turned out wrong. The clarity came from building the thing, not from describing it first.
For coordinating people or catching a security flaw before it ships, sure, all of this makes sense. Solo just runs on different rules I guess.
>But I spent five years on a solo app and never wrote anything close to this. Not on principle event, just the design just kept moving.
Yeah, I agree that for solo projects, it makes sense to greatly scale down the design phase. In a lot of cases, you'd scale design down to zero if you need user feedback to figure out what to build.
But even for solo projects, if I keep at it for months or years, I eventually get to the point where some problem is hard enough that I need to do some upfront design, even if it's not as formal as a whole design doc.