It’s become almost too easy to build a web application. The advent of frameworks like CakePHP, CodeIgniter or Ruby on Rails, have given us the chance to write code as fast as we can think it. This can almost be extrapolated to a number of fields like writing, design, filmmaking, you name it.
But with this reduced barrier from concept to delivery, comes a cost: the final product is usually not very well thought out.
Take, for instance, films like “Benjamin Button” or sites like Plinky. There’s plenty of eye-candy, but at the end of the day, they don’t do much about changing the world. That’s fine and there always be projects like these.
But when it comes to you, what would you rather work on? A meaningful project or a time sinker?
It’s a good exercise to have one sentence that describes what your project will solve in the user’s lives. “MyWidget.com is a site that helps users solve the problem of x, y, z”.
In these past few weeks I’ve been thinking about a project to tackle. A project that will allow me to learn stuff I haven’t had a chance to use in my work environment. I want a project that allows me to learn more about cloud computing and databases (like Amazon’s SimpleDB). So I have a chance to build yet another version of “Hot or Not”, or do something that can help people solve a problem. It’s always easier to take the fun route, but with the current economic downturn, I feel like it’s not the responsible thing to do.
What’s your next world-changing project?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree that frameworks are here to stay, and I welcome the time efficiencies they create. It really is now possible to develop and deploy web apps very rapidly – but at an extreme cost machine resources: most appallingly memory and CPU.
I’m not sure what the answer to this is. I have no desire to go back to my days of writing bare-metal machine code, but it seems something has been lost in the last several decades. Languages and frameworks are abstractions often built upon earlier abstractions, which tend to multiply the inefficiencies of lower layers, and further distancing those who build systems from the heart of the machine. In short, there are too many layers and too few people who understand them or that they even exist at all.
I think your point is that scalability and performance suffer, and I have to say that I absolutely agree. The number of people I’ve worked with who fully understand and internalize those last two points when designing systems are few.
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Well… I’m not a programmer but I’ve run a number of software projects. In the early 2000′s we did a lot of “multimedia” applications using Macromedia Director. There were often issues with memory leakage and conventions that needed to be used to clear the issue. In a sense, it can be considered a platform in the way something like Ruby is now. I know, I know, not the same thing.
As machines got bigger and faster, bloatware (what’s that company in Redmond?) was able to hide in machine capability and escape scrutiny. Either machines will be powerful enough to overcome the inherent application slop and those in the know will be annoyed but look the other way, or a frameworks 2.0 mentality will evolve and the frameworks will have tools to clean up shoddy coding.
We’ll see!
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