The conceit that I could glue a bunch of libraries together in a 48 period to get an MVP-level of program that is nowhere near as polished as the collective output of teams of people, and would fall over at anything resembling load, is not the problem.
It's the implicit derision, that eg Twitter is inherently worthless because I could glue a few libraries together to a database over a weekend, and have a simplistic system where users who are able to broadcast short messages to other users, that is so odious about the "build it in a weekend" mindset. It denigrates the very real, but largely invisible effort it takes to scale a system up to that level. For any of us who have been involved with scaling a system up, it's invalidating to have your work invalidated like that. A Twitter or Dropbox clone built in 48 hours isn't going to handle the scale of actual Dropbox, nor will it be as resilient as actual Twitter in the face of eg a whole AWS region going down.
Build something awesome this weekend! (or even just something useful; it doesn't even have to be software) Just don't shit on someone else's hard work, even (especially!) if you don't get it. That Dropbox, reduced to it's basics is "just" a filesync client, and isn't actually the most technology fascinating project when described at that level, is an reflection of the oversimplification of the problem at hand, and not the inherent worthiness of solving that problem. The social aspects of what a program can be used for goes wholly underestimated and misunderstood a lot of the time. No one could deny the effect on the world that Twitter has had (though we don't have to agree on if the net effect was positive or negative), but many people still don't see the value of a product that isn't a revolutionary new technical product, like terabit wifi, but that's a reflection on their lack of imagination on their part, and not a poor reflection on Twitter as a business idea.
It's the implicit derision, that eg Twitter is inherently worthless because I could glue a few libraries together to a database over a weekend, and have a simplistic system where users who are able to broadcast short messages to other users, that is so odious about the "build it in a weekend" mindset. It denigrates the very real, but largely invisible effort it takes to scale a system up to that level. For any of us who have been involved with scaling a system up, it's invalidating to have your work invalidated like that. A Twitter or Dropbox clone built in 48 hours isn't going to handle the scale of actual Dropbox, nor will it be as resilient as actual Twitter in the face of eg a whole AWS region going down.
Build something awesome this weekend! (or even just something useful; it doesn't even have to be software) Just don't shit on someone else's hard work, even (especially!) if you don't get it. That Dropbox, reduced to it's basics is "just" a filesync client, and isn't actually the most technology fascinating project when described at that level, is an reflection of the oversimplification of the problem at hand, and not the inherent worthiness of solving that problem. The social aspects of what a program can be used for goes wholly underestimated and misunderstood a lot of the time. No one could deny the effect on the world that Twitter has had (though we don't have to agree on if the net effect was positive or negative), but many people still don't see the value of a product that isn't a revolutionary new technical product, like terabit wifi, but that's a reflection on their lack of imagination on their part, and not a poor reflection on Twitter as a business idea.