My kingdom for a product team that really gets usability and ux. Google Docs doesn't. Reedsy doesn't. Microsoft Office Online/365 doesn't. Zimbra doesn't. Even (seemingly) "simple" things like Slack and Gmail screw the pooch. It is as if nobody ever uses their own products or somethin'.

There's this thing that software developers seem to do: they seem to invent all sorts of alternative ways of doing the same thing, and those things all come together to make getting anything actually achievably done well-nigh impossible. Or at least really depressingly tricky and laborious and painful and error-prone and slow.

For example, all the different ways there are to build a Java/JVM based project. Makefiles, Ant, Maven, Ivy, Leiningen, Gradle, Eclipse, Intellij, NetBeans, et. al. (Or, say, all the ways to try to build a JavaScript thing using modules.)

The fundamental epic fail of it all is that pretty much none of these things support a layer of meta abstraction and introspection that would let us actually debug them. These systems commit a cardinal sin of programming ux: being only a write-forward system with no closing of the loop via debugger tools. I have no way to know what thing I need to adjust in order to get my build to work. If you search around for people trying to solve similar problems, you will see a ton of trial-and-error crap. ("It worked on my machine." "I don't know what I did, but suddenly it started working." "Try uninstalling and reinstalling." etc.)

The fact that this kind of development environment doesn't seem to make anybody bat an eyelash and wonder, "is there a better way?" makes me so utterly steam-coming-out-of-my-ears hopping mad - and depressed.