| > If you're just starting a project out, you have to decided whether it's worth an extra X hours/days/weeks for any given bit of technical improvement The thing is, PE is all about creating a workable, universal baseline that can be enhanced. It is a Minimum Viable Product. If you don't know if your product is, at its core, fulfilling a need, why spend the extra time making it fancy? > Where I cut off my robustness work depends on the nature of the project, but every project has some point at which you'd improve user experience more by adding a feature than improving performance. For an early prototype, that point may be quite soon. A prototype is naturally a quickly assembled thing (often held together by chicken wire and duct tape) that you use to test the viability of an idea. Build prototypes however you want. Of course I'd argue that a bare-bones MVP would be the cheapest way to test an idea, but it doesn't really matter. A prototype should never be your production product unless you know it to be robust though. You should expect to rewrite most of your prototype in order to make it production ready. Unless you follow PE, of course, in which case you should have a solid, usable baseline that you can enhance into your amazing final product. > I think the author is aware of this, but there are many apps which just don't fit particularly well into a document. It's not clear whether the author really thinks all such apps are trivial (eg detecting your dog's age), but I'd argue there are plenty of substantial apps that don't fit that model well, and benefit substantially from being a full-on js-heavy web app. I would counter-argue that we naturally gravitate toward doing stuff that's fun for us or gives us the opportunity to show off our skills. We over complicate things because we like challenges. Take the "dog age" example. An MVP would be uploading a photo and having the age guessing take place on the server side. One enhancement would do that via Ajax, another would add tap getUserMedia if it's available. In the end, the product works no matter what. There are very few "apps" that would not work in a PE scenario; it's all in how you look at them. The problems we are solving today on the Web are not new problems. For a great, brief talk on these topics, watch Adam Silver discuss at EnhanceConf: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UlzG6-fI00g |