Just some words about this because that is a common outside perspective.
The ambitions behind the Piston project are hard challenges which requires an overall planning and architecture. Most people without many years of experience would stick to a single project and might feel the scope of the whole project is too big. That is understandable, but still underestimate the ambitions of the project. Planning, architecture design and maintenance is the easy part!
The hard part is:
- Provide a work environment where people have creative freedom but enough feedback to drive innovation forward
- Continuous integration and collaboration across projects
- Pursue ideas that have long term value, in particular ideas that can not become real otherwise, because people outside the project do often not understand the idea before it brings results
- Communicate clearly such that the project continue without major obstacles, without intervention or pressure from people not aligned with the goals, without burnouts, at a pace that can sustained over many years
- Maximize the benefit to humanity over the course of the project and through end results
The only way to achieve this is to let the people who work on Piston to direct the projects, and use analysis as much as possible to work around obstacles. It is easy to see in hindsight that the direction was right, but since the future is much more unpredictable, it will feel like âthe project is heading the wrong directionâ to outsiders. This is where you should be aware of hindsight bias, because people knowing their stuff are a lot smarter than you think! Besides, there is always some risk of making wrong decisions, but we calculate this into the analysis and make the best guess we can make.
When sailing at sea one sets a course toward the horizon. The goal might be beneath the horizon, and for a person unfamiliar with that ocean it seems like the boat could be heading anywhere. In software, goals are very complex and difficult to explain, and the territory to get there is often unfamiliar. You seek something new, try and fail, and that gives you the experience to spot where the gold is next time. There is not one particular project or technique that has all the gold in it, but all combined that has value. The integration is the treasure of gold!
Programmers have often the idea that simplicity is the goal, but things that look simple turns out to be quite complex under the hood.
See Living with complexity - a talk by Don Norman
A big software project is too large than any single person can fit it inside the mind, so by default, it feels large for everyone. That does not mean something is wrong - it is just the way it is.
The policy we have in Piston is that by default, we trust people who work on stuff. They decide what to do, and this often leads to better results than any single person thought upfront. This kind of working environment is one I like, because I get excited by what will happen next!