Wrong way driver

Tue 22 November 2016 in zells

Maybe I'm just a cynic and maybe this is just a rant but I think software development nowadays su... I'm highly discontent with the way software development is done. To be more specific, I've listed a bunch of incidental complications that make programming unnecessarily hard along with ideas how they could be avoided in the zells manifesto.

My theory is that programming is just way too complicated nowadays and what's worse is that it actually gets more complicated. But the need for people able to create, understand, modify and share software is ever increasing and will even more so in the future. So in recent years a number of (mostly online) courses for learning programming sprouted.

One of them if treehouse that I know only very little about but they seem to invest a lot in marketing. I suppose for that reason, youtube decided to recommend this video to me. It shows Ryan Carson giving a big picture overview of the field of software development.

I'm not exactly sure what the video is trying to do. It certainly doesn't try very hard to make software development look easy. Since it's a marketing tool, it probably wants to make it look just complicated enough to convince you to book a course with them, but not too complicated to disillusion you.

I think a lot of people will agree with the contents of the video that this is just the way it is and they might even think that's a good thing. To me, the video shows almost every ten seconds something that is terribly wrong about the way things are.

It's things like

  • having to chose a platform and device format up-front.
  • Being completely locked-in on iOS regarding hardware and software.
  • Depending of the approval of some company for what you are allowed to share with the world.
  • Having to deal with at least 5 technologies, including databases, when developing for the Web.
  • Putting code in static text files.
  • Creating designs with static images.
  • Developing in phases with one guy for each phase.
  • And of course having applications at all.

Every single one of these points make me cringe.

A frightening thought for me is that there might be only a handful of people in the world that feel this way. So maybe in the end it'll turn out that I'm the wrong-way driver who thinks every body else is driving in the wrong direction.

But better ideas have been around since the 60s/70s. If you want to see a modern adoption of one of them, have a look at lively kernels.


Wanna talk about it? Found typo or wanna add something? Edit me