Random thoughts
I don't think I'll ever be able to use an airport restroom again without thinking of this.
I attended a presentation yesterday called "Why Software Sucks." The bottom line was that developers need to understand how their users actually use the software. For example, one company that provides online backup solutions offers 3 options: back up everything, back up "My Documents" only, or pick and choose which files to back up. The latter option was added at the insistence of the developers writing the software, who believed it was really important to offer that level of control to the users. According to the company's CEO, not one actual customer has ever selected that option.
I've also become convinced that Visual Studio 2008 is by far the best development environment ever created. I saw a demo where the presenter decided to rename a column in a database table. Within 2 or 3 clicks, the table was renamed, the stored procedures referencing that table had all been updated, and all code calling those stored procedures had been updated with the new column name. Other really cool features include full-featured AJAX debugging, multi-targeting, and a very intelligent GUI for CSS editing. And you can auto-generate architecture diagrams of your application, so a new developer who has never seen your app before doesn't actually need to trace through the code to figure out how it works.
I attended a presentation yesterday called "Why Software Sucks." The bottom line was that developers need to understand how their users actually use the software. For example, one company that provides online backup solutions offers 3 options: back up everything, back up "My Documents" only, or pick and choose which files to back up. The latter option was added at the insistence of the developers writing the software, who believed it was really important to offer that level of control to the users. According to the company's CEO, not one actual customer has ever selected that option.
I've also become convinced that Visual Studio 2008 is by far the best development environment ever created. I saw a demo where the presenter decided to rename a column in a database table. Within 2 or 3 clicks, the table was renamed, the stored procedures referencing that table had all been updated, and all code calling those stored procedures had been updated with the new column name. Other really cool features include full-featured AJAX debugging, multi-targeting, and a very intelligent GUI for CSS editing. And you can auto-generate architecture diagrams of your application, so a new developer who has never seen your app before doesn't actually need to trace through the code to figure out how it works.