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Posts Tagged ‘Programming’

Just in case I’m not the last person on earth to hear about it, stackoverflow.com is one of the most useful programming sites on the internet. If works a lot like Yahoo! Answers, where questions are asked, answers are posted by humans, and the answers are voted on for their effectiveness. Unlike Yahoo! Answers, the questions are less “How is babby formed?” and more of the “How do I get this *bleep*ing code to work?”. All manner of programming subjects are tagged and categorized, from ESRI to fortran.

Most importantly, by answering questions on the site, freelancers can show off their skills or keep certain areas of expertise fresh . Unlike posting on programming forums and blogs, stackoverflow has the potential to reach more people from multiple disciplines. If demand for one technology goes down, clients and recruiters don’t have to go look far to see what else you are capable of.

The computer industry implants in the minds of many the legend of the lone programmer, sequestered in a parents basement coding the next paradigm shift of technology. The myth is not that far from the truth, since many of the big names in software, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, were all created by hobbyists charting unknown territory in code.

I’m sure that everyone working in computers today, everyone, has some crazy project roiling in the back of their heads. But the majority of us don’t even start, let alone finish these projects out of fear that we aren’t qualified to do this, that we should let someone with “expertise” eventually make that app we want.  What we fail to realize is that the “experts” rarely know more than we do what unwritten programs look like. The only reason they are experts is that they’ve made their fear work for them. The frustration and uneasiness that comes from a new language and technology drives them forward instead of holding them back.

So if you’ve got an app or a script or whatever on the back burner, get it up on the monitor right now. Find that spot where you left off and feel that mixture of rage, terror, and embarrassment that made you shelve it. That feeling isn’t telling you that there is something wrong, it is telling you that you are working on something challenging and worthy of your skills. That feeling, right there, is the frontier of software development.

Is it just me, or do open source software packages have this tendency to overload features until their control panels look like the dashboard of a 747? Granted, there are some open source products out there that are truly great. Simple to use, easy to customize and a cinch to navigate. But if you’re looking at what looks like a casualty of the feature creep wars, chances are it’s an open source product. Most of the setup involves turning off all the various features you are never going to use. It feels like the product of the same insecurity that informs Microsoft’s attempts to catch up to Mac OS. Someone ought to tell the developers of Blender or Zen-cart that people aren’t turning close-source products because they have more features. You don’t need to find a new user interface paradigm to wrest control of the market from Microsoft and Apple. All you really need is to stay open source, free to download for all.