Help Mario Reach The Next Platform!
Don’t leave him behind, or with a jump that’s just too far!
NOTE: This was originally posted on my own corner of the Internet.
Nothing is static. The world is moving, and it’s the job of a platform to help an ecosystem evolve at the right pace.
When the pace is good, as the screen moves right, Mario sees where he needs to jump next and can time it well. It’s fun to be in the flow jumping from improvement to improvement!
When the pace is too fast, Mario feels stuck and either disappears off screen, or does a Hail Mary jump without a real chance to land on the next platform, falling into fire in bowsers castle.
Platforms need to treat the time that developers have to spend on evolving alongside us as precious. They should strive to minimize their toil, keeping a high level of trust with the developer community.
What are the keys to success here? How should we, as platform owners, drive things? This post will detail:
- Understanding the use cases
- Building enough of the new platform
- Having everything we can to help you get there
- Sharing pieces early
- Starting the deprecation clock appropriately
- Staying close to the platform
- Do you need a new platform?
Understanding the use cases
We need to understand Mario’s needs and why it will be better for him to be on the new platform
When bringing up a v.next of a service, the platform needs an understanding of what the current version is being used for. A new version is shipping for a reason, and there should be clarity on basic questions such as:
- How will developers be able to deliver the functionality they are offering?
- Are there any capabilities that are not offered in the new version yet and what is the impact? When options are restricted, it’s obviously a different set of timing should be considered
- When will replacement capabilities show up (in the cases when they do)?
- What are the new capabilities that we will be bringing to developers and what will they unlock?
Seems blindingly obvious, but having deep knowledge here is far from universal, and past decisions are often lost, not allowing us to apply Chestertons Fence.
Building enough of the new platform
We want the new platform wide enough that Mario can stick the landing
With a strong understanding, the new platform starts the journey of getting built and iterating. It’s vital to make sure that we have an appropriate amount of it built out before sharing it with the developer community. With a minimal surface area, you are at risk of not finding enough information and thus ending up making large changes in the future, and developers are left touching a small part of the elephant and extrapolating the rest.
The more we can get the new version in close range, the better the chance we have of enticing Mario, and having him get across to the other side with a cheer.
When building the new platform, we should also make sure to do a good job with our layering. As we do this, Mario will not have to learn new things for each part of his journey, and will instead accrue understanding. Great layering also means that we will be able to compose our solutions better, resulting in less churn as we make changes. This should result in fewer massive migrations.
Having everything in place to help evolution
We want to give Mario jet packs and tools to make the leap
When making these platform changes, we are often placing toil on developers. Hopefully, there is much value too, but there will often be times where the changes we impose have a strong overall ecosystem value, but maybe not always the same value for the individual developer. The tragedy of the commons are real, and we can recognize this by going above and beyond with our help for developers.
What does the jet pack look like?
World class documentation on the why and the how. This is foundational, and includes great reference docs, tutorials & workshops, and samples & solutions.
World class tooling, where developers live all day long. Linters and codemods that give clear guidance and nudging on what changes are needed. With everything that it changing with development right now (e.g. AI copilots) imagine how far we could take this? Why can’t we have a future that has platform help in our developers code editors giving suggestions, and sending PRs to GitHub with changes that keep their projects up to date. If we did this right we could change the feeling from “ugh I feel like I am constantly being nagged to make some change! $PLATFORM understands that I have features to write and a business to run!!” to “Wow, $PLATFORM is helping me keep up to date and improving my app! I can see the improvements, and merchants are loving it!”
Sharing early
Show Mario a glimpse into what’s coming up in the level so he can prepare
The window can be pretty small for Mario, and it can be helpful to offer a view of what’s coming, as long as we aren’t flooding him with information (see: building enough of the platform!).
Depending on what kind of changes we are doing, we may be able to allow developers to play with the future pieces early.
Remix does a great job of this. It allows you to opt into future flags, and then when the future becomes the present, you are ready for it!
How does that work? Let’s look at an example. Remix 2 is coming out soon, but the changes and new features are coming online in a way that you can opt in your Remix 1.* application today. The way that you name routes and their mapping with the file system is changing from this to a new system that includes flat routes.
Instead of waiting for Remix 2, today I can update my app with a couple simple steps:
- Tell my v1 app that I am ready to use the new feature via a simple declaration in my
remix.config.js: future: { v2_routeConvention: true }- Update my directories and files to map to the new system
When the feature is ready, communicating it could ramp up over time. You can start small and see a few early adopters find it and offer feedback. Recently the dev server started to console.log the fact that it’s ready, reaching more developers, and more feedback can flow in.
When Remix 2 ships, those who opted in will be able to delete the future flags and everything will just work. Now picture this for a larger number of flags. I can opt in and then I will be fully ready, finding myself on the next platform without even jumping… I just kept walking and got there.
Starting the deprecation clock appropriately
Don’t disintegrate the current platform too early!
You know those blocks that fall away when Mario has been stood on them for a bit? I hate those. They mean I have to think really quickly, anxiety rises, and I make mistakes and fall to my doom.
While it can be great to share information on the new platform early, as discussed, we should be careful when choosing when the clock starts ticking on deprecating the existing platform.
NOTE: A recent example of this was OpenAI deprecating the Codex API where the team maybe didn’t quite appreciate that although other APIs had somewhat transcended it, the work to make changes is real. To their credit, they got feedback and changed the deprecation by at least allowing longer access in the research program.
The clock shouldn’t start until the entire new platform is built, and we have the jetpacks ready. There have been times in which we build piece A of the new and deprecate the equivalent piece on the old. The problem is that the developer can’t actually migrate everything over, and they can become stuck.
In general we should cluster our changes and have clear times for most of our developers to do upgrades (the ones who aren’t jumping early to changes).
And we should be very careful not to end up in the situation that the meme shows above, where the new platform isn’t ready and the old one is deprecated. It’s so common to as often be the norm, and we need to fight entropy to change this.
I always somewhat appreciated the fact that I could schedule time after a major iOS SDK release to update our apps. The business understood this, and we had the space to make this happen in one chunk, and get our new app into the app store ready for the consumer releases. Contrast this with a drip, drip, drip of being asked to make small changes constantly.
Staying close to the platform
Favor the lightest abstractions that aren’t proprietary. Developers should be spending their time learning the platform, not new technology for the sake of it. For example, before creating a proprietary layout system that every developer has to learn, can we use CSS with our own special variables and styles and a sandboxed container to limit it? Or instead of creating a custom abstraction to fetch content, how about using the standard fetch(), even if you have to monkey patch it to add in specific auth, just make sure it’s well tested! No uncanny valley here please. Let developers bring their skills, and StackOverflow and ChatGPT along with them.
Do you need a new platform?
Mario would be happy to walk along and maybe take some stairs?
Before falling for second system syndrome, double and triple check that the right path forward is a new platform at all, or if there are smaller steps that can be made that over time will get Mario where he needs to be.
Respecting developers time
Let’s treat the time that developers have as a precious commodity. It actually takes work to stand still, as there is no such thing as stable. Browsers are changing. Libraries and SDKs and tools are changing, and we add to that. The more we can do to minimize it by putting in work on our side, the more leverage we get across the ecosystem. We want them spending as much time as possible on amazing features for our merchants, and jumping their way to success along the way.
🍄 Let’s a go! 🍄
/fin
