Getting past the first layer on the OSS onion

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”
Steve Jobs
.

The quote above pretty well describes my experience with OSS. The first solutions we come up with for a given problem are generally very complex…. and that’s where we stop because there are so many other problems to move on to next.

Does that reflect your experiences too?

Do we ever get the chance to take a deep breath because we have all our roadmap items completed, and then therefore have time to peel more layers off old problems?

In my experience this just doesn’t happen. So that just leaves us with solutions that are complex… to the detriment of OSS as a whole.

So the question for you today is how to give the time and space to be able to peel more layers off our OSS onions?

My initial thought is that we should stop adding so many things into the roadmap – to take the 80/20 approach into our roadmap prioritisation – leaving more time to refine the really important stuff. I’d love to hear your thoughts though.

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