r0ml.net To Make or To Do
The question that suggests itself is: is coding (or cutting code as Amir would have it) doing or making? I used to think it was making — but that, of course is a product-centric view. Software-as-a-service needs to take the world view that the production of software is doing: there is no such thing as finishing.
The real import of this question, of course, is that doers and makers are different kinds of people; if in fact this essential nature of software is changing, then the people who participate in the activity and enjoy it will also change.
Unless they speak a Romance language — in which case there doesn’t seem to be any difference.
ActiveGrid CEO Sees LAMP, XML as Next-Gen Apps Platform
Peter Yared: That’s a key point, There is a shift underway that we call traditional development cycle versus a services-driven development cycle. In traditional appdev, applications get written by Java and mostly by hand, and devs have to pick out the exact server architecture they want ( and whether it will include stateless session beans, Hibernate or whatever. Then, they hand-code to that [architecture] directly. … What’s interesting when you talk to the business people or upper management, they want to lightweight servers on commodity machines.
I think r0ml and Peter are getting at the same point here. Being a romatic language speaker myself, I like to think that I can be both a maker and a doer. Software development, I believe, is undergoing an evolutionary shift. This idea may be best illustrated by looking at the Agile Software Development movement. “Make as you do”. To survive, software developers will have to innovate(ie Make) as they do(ie provide a service). If you choose to only provide a service, you will be marginalized and commoditized out of business. On the other hand, software lifecycles have become shorted. The philosophy of innovate and develop now and develop a buisness model later is becoming the mark of dinosaurs.
