SebastianVerified account

It takes a lot of hubris to say "I want to build a monotool that replaces the functionality of several projects that others have worked extremely hard on. Not only that, I want a big splashy release with lots of hype so I gain a lot of interest and adoption".

To me, I value organic adoption. Now that I've reached a particular position in the community, and people are familiar with the projects I've worked on, anything I release will implicitly get more attention than some others.

I don't want anyone using it because it has X person associated with it. I want it to be used because it's actually useful rather than some flashy new thing that people feel obligated to jump on.

Thinking about it more, there's probably not a lot I can do to prevent it. And doing an "impromptu" release could have the opposite effect. If I didn't want any expectations then I shouldn't have spoken publicly about it at all. That's the main reason I didn't prior.

I don't want early access. I'm afraid of building an ivory tower of privileged people. For Yarn we invited people at the beginning. It allowed them to influence the development process but we overrotated on their feedback.

It's possible to select people who are the most relevant, and I felt like we did. The feedback was valuable, but they weren't necessarily the ones who would actually be invested post-release.

So I spent time satisfying their constraints which would turn out to not be relevant. Again, this can be mitigated if you have a more cohesive community where everyone is mostly on the same page.

Another point is around inclusivity. I don't want anyone to feel left out. No matter how wide you cast the net, there's always going to be someone valuable you've left out. Performing value judgements on people is gross and not really something I want to have to do.