Not sure I can use that as a trademark or even a motto, but Flowerpot, the sales software I am building is essentially that.
Check out this article over at Ship It On the Side talking about the timeliness of Flowerpot and online sales software.
A wise man once concluded that there is no such thing as a free lunch. He was right, of course. Agile methodologies have promised programmers that they can build big software without big planning-up-front.
If Agile isn’t promising success without planning then what is it promising? If you can’t answer that then welcome to Earth.
Why is this a problem? Because Agile is selling a promise to developers that must be fulfilled by architects and designers.
Yes, the Agile practices of 2-week timeframe’s, daily stand-up meetings, pair programming, etc, depend on the simple fact that SOMEONE is keeping a clear vision of the end product in mind.
That sounds like BDUF (big design up front). Someone has to do it. It’s not the developer’s responsibility, it’s the architect’s.
So successful Agile development requires an architect to succeed.
A techtalk video of Hubert Smits, the Agile Guy, inspired this post.
Warning, I’m wearing my Conspiracy Theorist Hat. It’s a nice hat, don’t get me wrong.
VB6 was taken off of the market in an attempt to keep software development costs high. –see, told ya… but it’s still a nice hat.–
If you wrote Windows software during the massive Y2K software update you likely knew someone who became a Windows programmer after learning Visual Basic 6. I admit, I thought VB was a toy language until I did wrote some software for a company who sold the it and made millions. Later my company built a video streaming server product using a VB6 front end (the back-end was in C++). Customers loved it! Not because it was written in VB6, but the fact is VB6 didn’t hurt it at all. And, by the way, much of that software was written by a VB6 programmer with less than a year of experience.
Now VB6 is essentially gone. Dot net is here (if you write Windows software) and Microsoft is not looking back. Even a massive online petition did nothing to sway MS.
Why?
VB6 introduced tons of new programmers to software development. Many of these new guys were not formally trained. They wouldn’t know O(n) from O(scary). They knew nothing of data structures, formal sorting and searching algorithms, and didn’t give a rip about optimal code performance. But what they did know was how to make Windows do what they wanted. They knew how to listen to their bosses and make forms and add buttons and get code snippets from all over the Internet written by other untrained programmers and, best of all, they knew how to spend all that cash they were making as new programmers. I knew a few guys who went from $30Kish to $80Kish nearly overnight. And on top of all that, they were cheaper than “classically trained” developers.
It was enough to irritate a classic programmer with all his knowledge of Knuth and Bubble sorts and COM/ATL internals. Classically trained developers saw a stagnation of income. Before these new fly by the seat of the pants VB6 programmers came along Windows software development hourly costs were skyrocketing. Then the great income gains slowed to a crawl, and then it all stopped.
And here you have a couple of problems: 1. programming was no longer the bastion of the “classically trained” programmer, and 2. with all these new guys jumping into the foray there was price competition. And we couldn’t have that. So, how do we solve this problem? Take VB6, with its easy programming paradigm off the market and keep it off.
As crazy as this sounds it all begs the question, why hasn’t someone filled the void left by VB6?
The new podcast about building software for profit while holding down a job has just been released! It’s called Ship it on the Side and can be found here: http://getflowerpot.com/podcast or at http://shipitontheside.com
The podcast is aimed at would be software entrepreneurs who are, or want to, build profitable software, on a limited budget, while holding down full time work. We would love to hear from you!
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