Showing posts with label Duct Tape Developer. Show all posts

Ease-of-Use SDKs Are Just Toys

Posted by Phillip Jackson in , , , on 22 September 2010

Was reading up on mobile development now that the Samsung Galaxy Tab is poised to compete with the iPad and the trend of mobile business application development is gaining steam and breadth at the world's largest companies to give visibility into the company to executives on the move as well as technical information to onsite supervisors.

This article struck me as a sobering voice opposing this regression back to the dark ages of MS Access style hobbyist development.


By Richard Adhikari


For the TL;DR's here is the important bit:
Ease-of-Use SDKs Are Just Toys

It's almost axiomatic in the high-tech industry that SMBs lack the expertise and in-house tech staff to do much in the way of IT work, so app development isn't easy for them. However, Apple and Google have unveiled SDKs are claimed to simplify the process.

For instance, Google's App Inventor claims to make the task on Android easier.However, it doesn't do away with the need for programming skills.

"Fundamentally, App Inventor doesn't appear to be that much different from Visual Basic," Randy Abrams, director of technical education at ESET, told TechNewsWorld. "I consider Visual Basic programming with Tinker Toys." App Inventor is "a way to get non-programmers interested in development," Abrams said.

When such non-programmers run into the limitations that drag-and-drop programming entails, some may be inspired to learn more and become more savvy. In other words, unless the programmer is sufficiently skilled, apps created with simplified SDKs may not be robust enough to meet SMBs' business requirements. And if the programmers are that skilled, SMBs may not be able to afford them.


I find a great deal of truth in the above statement. The industry doesn't need tools so easy to use that Aaron the Professional Accountant can write business applications for his needs; the industry doesn't need tools so easy to use that Adam the Amateur Coder can try to figure out how to glue some things together that might work; we need tools so easy to use that Dave the Professional Developer can write quality business applications for Aaron more quickly.

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Duct Tape Developers? I'm done with this guy

Posted by Phillip Jackson in , , , on 23 October 2009

“…but it seems to me like a lot of the Object Oriented Design principles you're hearing lately from people like Robert Martin and Kent Beck and so forth have gone off the deep end into architecture for architecture's sake. It doesn't seem like you could actually get any code written if you're spending all your time writing 8,000,000 unit tests, and every single dinky little class that you need to split a URL into four parts becomes an engineering project worthy of making a bridge, where you spend six months defining 1000 little interfaces. They've just gone off the deep end, and I don't think these people write very much code if they're coming up with these principles, to be honest, it doesn't even make sense.”

“One of the SOLID principles, and I'm totally butchering this, but…”
Yes Joel you are, let’s just stop there before I put that butcher knife to better use.

Joel has given up on what Brian Rigsby calls ‘the pursuit of unattainable perfection.’ If you aren’t pursuing perfection then, at *best*, you are sliding down into mediocrity. And honestly I think he gave up when he was Program Manager for the Excel team and his VBA garbage.

I think it’s safe to say this man’s creek is getting foggier by the day. As someone that has packed his own parachute before I would like to think he has an appreciation for a job done well. I mean we all assume EMTs know what they are doing… right:

Yes that duct tape went on faster than a gauze dressing, and I’m sure it’s getting the job done, though I can’t figure out what that job is without asking the person that put it on. More importantly I pity the guy that has to make a change to it. Our clients are assuming that we are also doing it right, and to not do it right, regardless of your excuse, is to invalidate that trust. If writing software well takes too long, then keep practicing until it doesn't.

Jon you are right, no doubt there is probably something good this clown has done or said in the past… but I don’t eat shit hoping there is a berry in it. ;)

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