Focus

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it em at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

—Steve Jobs

As a tech lead I see my primary contribution as saying "no" to features that co-workers think are important but can’t justify. The real trick is knowing when a new feature adds linear complexity (its own weight only) or geometric complexity (interacts with other features). Both should be avoided, but the latter requires extra-convincing justification.

—Lawrence Kesteloot

How do you make a statue of an elephant? Get the biggest granite block you can find and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.

Bejeweled

F-35

The Homer-mobile

No one told Homer…

Optimize/
Prioritize

In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over specifiers over theoretical purity.

—HTML5 Working Group

(Drupal's audience priorities, 2010)

Laptops

Laptops

Databases

• Consistency
• Availability
• Partition Tolerance

Pick 2

Drupal theming

• Theme an object (via preprocess)
• Theme some variables (via template)

Drupal look-and-feel

Who choses the markup?

• Template author?
• Module developer?
• Site builder?

Lead

Bad behavior

No!

Deletion API, 2007

• Chad Phillips (hunmonk)
• Collect deletion queries, batch, save
• Committed!... For 10 minutes

Didn't say No soon enough

Sometimes we can say no...

• Backward compatibility
• OOP Procedural
• $5 hosting
• Code style violations (too much?)

Not Invented Here

Proudly Invented Elsewhere

Functional programming
/Dependency Injection

• No to state
• No to implicit dependencies
• No to "quick and easy"

But YES to testing/maintainability

Who is Drupal for?

"Everybody" is a coward's answer

Who is Drupal not for?

Saying No should always be a deliberate, explicit action.