[theshrike79]

If there is an actual customer, try to get the scale of users/data the system is expecting. A system handling 1/1k/10M things every day will be quite different and need different solutions.

Problems arise when people reach for the Cool Tools and start building Webscale things that can handle 100M operations every second. ...but the customer only needs the system to handle 4 users who type in everything crap by hand. But hey, it has a clustered database and Kafka and Kubernetes and looks REALLY good on your Resumé.

When the scale is determined, I personally like the mantra of "Make it work first, then make it pretty". First build an MVP (or an ugly Viable Product), that proves your plan actually works, then you can iterate over it to make the implementation cleaner or faster or have better UX.

If you get stuck making everything super-generic and able to handle all possible cases, you'll spend time bikeshedding and never get anything deployed. Just Repeat Yourself with wild abandon and copy/paste stuff all over until your Gizmo actually works. You can spend time figuring out which parts are actually possible to make generic later.

[badams2527]

How much time do you spend "making it pretty" after you've got it functionally working? Interested to hear your experiences on that.

For a long time we would "pretty it up at the end", in one of my coworkers words, which lead to a ton of horrible UX decisions early on that required major legwork later. We switched to doing ux-driven development from the start and it's saved us a ton of time and saved ourselves from poor decisions haha.

[theshrike79]

I make it pretty until I hit a deadline or the customer runs out of money :D

It depends on the customer and project which parts I focus on making "pretty". If it's a data-intensive thing, I might spend time optimising the protocol, compression and making the data pipeline robust. For a web app I'll spend more time making it more usable by streamlining the most relevant flows (which I know of since the client has been testing the (M)VP already).