Michael Herold

Recently, I received a bug report on one of my open source projects. The bug report came from my co-maintainer on Hashie, dB, who I hold as an exemplary asker of questions. I quickly read through the issue and the background information on his issue and quickly sent him a reply that his suggestion sounded reasonable and that I would accept a contribution adding that behavior. I was attempting to be more like him and act as a facilitator, which is an attribute that I admire in him. However, I did a poor job of this task.

How do you think of your customers? Do you think you’re customer-driven? Or are you product-driven? Venkatesh Rao argues that you’re not customer-driven and has an interesting taxonomy for the ways in which you aren’t customer-driven. I think this hierarchy is really interesting, partly because of varying degrees of hubris in the ladder. It shows that the “expert vs layperson,” which I recoil from, is really only halfway down the ladder toward treating other humans poorly. Let’s look at the viewpoint of the expert vs. layperson in the context of application design.