Delete Key Love
Oct 13, 2006A Preface
Creating custom web apps makes me happy. There is something extremely satisfying in making an application that provides an exact solution set to a problem. Only the features you need, none of the bloat you don’t want.
This is not to say that I don’t respect boxed software either. It is necessary to provide good technical tools for non-technical people in an easy package. See Wordpress for a good example. Custom jobs just don’t scale either.
But I digress, back to custom software.
I’ve been wanting to do something fun with my personal site, larrymyers.com, for awhile now. I finally figured out that a tumblelog would satiate my desire to have place to put all the things I find online and keep Myers DS free of random browser tab purges.
So while there are plenty of good blogging tools out there, there’s nothing that really lends itself well to a blog that has an absence of titles and article based content. A custom solution was in order.
An Idea
Rather than start from scratch I realized that Simplist, the CMS that powers this site, already provided me with most of the functionality I’d need. The problem was that Simplist had more features than I needed.
This is where the fun started. When creating custom web apps you spend most of your time coding and adding functionality. My task here was to remove as much functionality as possible until I had only what I needed to create a tumblelog.
Code was mercilessly removed. It was invigorating. I deleted chunks of code, files, and even entire directory trees. What remained was 209 lines of code and a refreshingly simple application that would allow me to do exactly what I wanted.
The best part is that such a small code base will be easy to maintain and keep bug free.
A Conclusion
Designing less is challenging and fun. By limiting myself to a few specific points of functionality I was able to focus on streamlining the code and the UI to the point where it was dead simple to use. It also freed me up to think about higher level design issues and reconsider what is really needed to do basic web publishing.
If you have a project that you’ve become frustrated with because you find it too large and unwieldy don’t be afraid to use the delete key freely. Reevaluate your earlier notions of what the project should be and see if you can’t make it simpler and easier by removing things.