There is a huge group of people in the software development community who love to trash Microsoft. Every good story needs a villain and MS keeps playing the role so well. I’m not a fan of Office, ASP, .Net, etc., but its hard to argue with the impact that Windows has had on both businesses and consumers worldwide. Having worked on many complex enterprise applications I also appreciate the complexity of the MS world: The thousands of coordinated decisions that must be made each day in order to just survive much less thrive. Its easy to talk about a clean solid code base for your single application in a greenfield. Try it when you have dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of demanding customers, all running a different set of versions, patches and customizations.
» Continue reading “Oh, Microsoft”

a story of frustration and redemption

In the last two days I feel like I’ve been through both the worst and best sides of being a software developer.

frustration:
Yesterday started off as a day of possibilities. Another day to build really great stuff that I’m proud of and hopefully helps a few people out. Instead it was riddled with a host of issues on my own laptop including a hosed Ruby 1.8.7 upgrade, Readline compile failures, $PATH issues, a crashing IDE and a general feeling of crankiness. A lot of people, including myself, have talked about how exciting it is to code, especially in Ruby. How the philosophy is so different, and it is. But I couldn’t help but get the feeling that software development in general is still in its infancy — that some things that should be simple are not. It feels like we are still hand-cranking the Model-T to get it started. We’ve come a long way and are helping a lot of people, but we’ve got a long way to go before we are driving an all-electric Mini Cooper.
» Continue reading “shoes to the rescue”