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Are Modern Tools Solving Problems or Creating New Ones? | ✉️ #49

Illustration for 'MKDEV DISPATCH #49' featuring a person gazing thoughtfully, a paper airplane, and text 'Are modern tools solving problems or creating new ones?' on an orange background. Illustration for 'MKDEV DISPATCH #49' featuring a person gazing thoughtfully, a paper airplane, and text 'Are modern tools solving problems or creating new ones?' on an orange background.

Hey! 👋

I once wrote about my disappointment with software companies that create products aimed at simplifying developers' lives. Specifically, I'm disappointed by the need to "learn" how to use a product. If at any point in development you decide to add training webinars and quick start guides to your product's main page, it means your product is no longer helpful. Products that started as simple tools and then expanded to the size of enterprise companies are especially prone to this problem (this was roughly our mindset when Kirill and I created Transcripto: one product, one tool). Then you watch presentations from these companies and think, "damn, they are presenting a solution to a non-existent problem." These solutions also require additional training and... a lot of grumbling from the elderly. What am I getting at? I was watching a presentation of new products from Miro. You know this program, and many of you probably use it, especially those who work in teams. In this presentation, I saw what I would like to see in future products that claim to make work easier.

They presented an integration between Miro and AWS that immediately estimates infrastructure costs during the design process. You move infrastructure elements on the whiteboard, which are directly tied to AWS tools, allowing you to visualize your infrastructure. Everything updates in real-time, and a widget shows how much your infrastructure will cost depending on which models you attach, and you can look at the cost of each element in detail if needed.

Convenient? Absolutely. It will surely be useful to someone in the early stages of designing infrastructure. Practical? Who knows. Experience shows that optimizing cloud infrastructure costs often turns into untangling a spaghetti ball. But this is not always and necessarily related to poor planning. But that's a separate topic, for discussing which we charge a fee, so if you need to untangle the ball - give us a call :) What I want to say is that such integrations are the direction in which I would like software products to evolve. Make changes in one place and immediately see how these changes affect other parts of the product. Such connections exist, and they are everywhere in business. For example, we can see changes in architecture costs. But do we see changes in product delivery timelines, which will increase? And how does the increase in delivery time affect developers' working hours? And how will this affect the payroll? Will the product cost increase? We saved 20 cents per cycle on infrastructure - hooray! But now we pay developers 20 dollars more - bummer! Hey, Miro, can you do that? By the way, why not invite them to the podcast and ask them directly. What do you think?

What We've Shared

And on the website a new tutorial by Pablo:

What We've Discovered

A random reminder

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The 50th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, August 2nd. See you next time!