The 80/20 Rule

Following my previous statement ‘coding is fun’, I had some long coding hours which reminded me the complexity of developing a real product.

The first thing coming to mind is the 80/20 rule – it takes 20% of the time to complete 80% of the product but the remaining 20% take the rest 80% (there are several variations of this rule).
In practice, developing a cool demo is relatively easy. Many sources/samples are available on the web. The underline platforms do provide much of the basic functionality needed. Cutting corners is fine (actually it is a must). And it is clear who will click where and when.
But… converting it to a real product is a different story. Dealing with edge-cases, ensuring scalability to support many users, ensuring the architecture will be extendable in future releases, working on a pixel perfect UI and many other activities take much more time than the first quick-and-dirty demo.

So, is the statement ‘Coding is fun’ still correct? I would still say yes, mainly because of the satisfaction of creating something using your two hands (keyboard and a mouse).

The context of that is the initiative I’m working on – it is going to be shipped next week! As the first user to work with it I can ‘objectively’ say it’s a great product.
As the application monitors a run (among other things it does), it is challenging to test the scalability to deal with large data as you need to actually record the run. Therefore on last Saturday I ‘had’ to run 18km. Any volunteers for testing a marathon :-)

Users

One might claim that users can be a real pain - they have requests, find bugs and cause you deal with boring maintenance tasks rather than developing the next version. It is probably true, but…

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

So – “If a product was developed and no one uses it, does it exist?”

Following the previous post (coding is fun), I believe it is much more fun when real users use what you coded (and of course like it).
A few days ago I found out that my ‘first Facebook application’ was downloaded and used by ~100 people. It was a very pleasant surprise.

This is one of the advantages when targeting end-users and not huge companies (consumer vs. enterprise) – the cycles are very short and you can have your product being used by users very fast.

Leveraging this advantage, we are going to ship in a few weeks our first Android application.
To double the fun, the idea of the application is based on my other hobby – running. More details to follow…

Happy Hanukkah, Mary Christmas and Happy New Year!

Coding is Fun

At SAP I spent the last few years mainly at meetings, writing PowerPoint and Word documents, attending conf-calls and… meetings, meetings, meetings… actually doing whatever was needed for managing a large team. As far as I can remember, I enjoyed it.

Now, working in a bootstrap mode, I got back to write code. PowerPoint was replaced by Eclipse and Visual Studio. I really forgot how fun it is.
Being a developer is quite cool.
I was afraid that I’m rusty and not up to date with all new technologies but it seems that my experience pays off.
At the beginning it looks like software development became simple: google->copy->paste->refactor->compile->deploy->eat pizza (actually not sure about the last part). However, still, for development of high scale programs, software engineering skills and unavoidable.

To make it more interesting, I’m developing using several technologies
Device- Google Android OS (Apps are written in Java and run on a custom VM which runs on top of a Linux kernel)
Web Service - .Net – (to be replaced with a ‘cloud technology’)
Web client – Flex (to achieve rich client experience)

I should dedicated a post for the android SDK + Emulator (Google did a good job), but in the meantime I found myself awake at very late hours debugging my code.
Did I already say that coding is fun :-)

P.S. I found this picture lately. Given the current economic situation, it's not so funny.