Sublime

When you try to do 100 percent of what somebody wants, you need a perfect match, and it's pretty rare that you have a perfect match between what you thought people needed and what they actually need. If you just try instead to do 80 percent of what they need, there's a pretty good chance that you'll hit a sweet spot. So Rails is really about trying

Livingston: Why did users like Viaweb? Graham: I think the main thing was that it was easy. Practically all the software in the world is either broken or very difficult to use. So users dread software. They've been trained that whenever they try to install something, or even fill out a form online, it's not going to work. I dread installing stuff,

Livingston: Was the code tuned to the IBM machine? Kapor: It was tuned to the Intel 808X 16-bit architecture. And Sachs was also very, very good. He was just an artist at high performance with limited resources. I didn't know how good he was; I got lucky. I knew he was good, but he was a genius at this sort of stuff. The two of us together was esse

surgeon.

Today hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people might develop a piece of software. This has led to two things, Saarinen says: a focus on process over product, and removing engineers from positions of influence. “I think people get too focused on the different frameworks and processes,” he says, “and you start to forget, what are you actually doing?

Livingston: Can you remember any features from del.icio.us that the users wanted or really loved that surprised you? Schachter: There's always stuff. I tend to be careful about that. I think people ask for features—they want to do something, but they don't say, "I want to do that something." They translate it into some feature that typica