RAD already
So, look at RAD in C#! I can develop this many applications (20 now) in an average 4 hours per night, 80 hours total.
For those who don't know it, RAD stands for Rapid Application Development. It's where you buckle up, go into tunnel vision, and just write code. While you don't worry too much about clean code, and scalability - if you know what you're doing these things come naturally.
In 80 hours, I've written 20 applications - at least 10 of which could be made into commercial apps in just a couple more hours of polish. So why don't we see large organizations doing this? Is it just the brainwashing of large consulting companies who want to convince you that a team of 50 programmers (40 in India) is necessary? Who knows....
Bottom line - we the programmers of the world today can write massive amounts of functionality very quickly if given the freedom to innovate. With tools like google and krugle, we have everything we need. Use cases? Yeah, I got your use cases.
Never heard of krugle?!?!?!? Check them out! "A search engine for developers". w00t!
Next up, SPAM!
<SPAM>
As you read this, I don't want you to feel sorry for me, because I
believe everyone will die someday. My name is Mr.Abdul Nasser Naji,a
merchant Dubai in the UAE. I have been diagnosed with Esophageal Cancer
which was discovered very late,due to my laxity in caring for my health.
.
.
.
The last of my money which no one knows of, is the huge cash deposit
of twenty four million dollars($24,000 000.OO) that I have with a Security
Company outfit in Europe for safe keeping. I want you to help me
collect this deposit and disburse it to some CHARITY ORGANIZATIONS,
THE LESS PRIVILEGED AND VICTIMS OF CURRENT HURRICANE KATRINA, AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTER.
<SPAM>
Of course he goes on to say that he's loaded and wants to give me all his money if I give him my bank account, social, and mother's maiden name. It's so nice of him to care about hurricane katrina! o.0
And of course, enjoy today's app. I'm sure someone will get a kick out of it. Especially you script k1dd1es.
posted by Unknown @ 11:24 PM
12 comments
12 Comments:
You know, Google just launched their own Google Code Search.
How does Krugle stack up against Google Code Search?
http://www.google.com/codesearch
The codesearch thing is new from Google.
Large teams are sometimes required because not every app is a keyboard/mouse tracker or image resizer...
I would definately say that there is not a lot of coders that can do what you do Jedi. I have met a lot of iffy developers who are "paycheck" coder and do not have a passion for it like you do.
Which RAD you use, VS or Delphi ? I'm more delphi personally, much much faster compilation time imho and it does C# too.
Hi Jedi,
I love you idea! What a great way to build your experience, I hope your company values your skills properly?
I had also had a suggestion for an app, although I expect you've finished taking orders. ;o)
How about an application that efficiently searches your entire harddrive for applications you've installed, and logs them all into an XML document or something?
I've seen some nice directory search code in Krugle, and maybe you could have it run as a wee light weight service scheduled at certain times.
Anyway keep up the good work, Ben Emson...
Oh yes, I also thought that if you kept any notes on any of your own personal RAD techniques you should perhaps publish them when you finish. Maybe with a CD of your apps and comments.
That way you could make a bit of dosh as well as spreading your knowledge.
Ben Emson...
You are doing a wonderful job - but why comment on India?
Large organizations are doing it because they want to get money from some other large organizations who are willing to pay them.
And a programmer is a programmer even in India.
If more Americans were as passionate about their "careers" as you are (rather than dreading their "job") there would be less outsourcing... You've helped awaken the jedi in us all...
Here are a couple ideas:
Build an app that reads off the RSS feeds you've subscribed to, it might be a little too aggressive but I would like to be able to yell "Next" and have it start reading the next rss feed.
Build an app to track the apps you have built - for each app listed it should have additional information pointing to the projects used from various open source places, snapshots of the licenses at the time of creation, and maybe some additional items (derived project links you know to projects people have created from your apps, or metrics indicating how well the project was received by your community) Allow easy publishing of this information to the web..?
This would be a bit more aggressive, but I would personally would like a good alarm clock for the PC where I can set it to play an mp3 from my music collection at a given time, here's the kicker: configuration should be set via voice commands. I want to be able to say "Set Alarm" 8 AM, "SongX", stop alarm, and snooze, for quicker coding SongX could be replaced by a number from the song collection.
If you do happen to use any of these ideas please mention my alias..
-CodeRogue
To stir up some debate, upon using a couple of your applications, I have seen less reason to use RAD. For the 6 or so applications I have used, I have noticed that many of them have extremely high memory usage, and have had two crash while in use.
Point in case, your connection monitor program. While a very useful application, I noticed that it idles using over 20 megs of RAM and almost 20 Megs of swap. That's a lot for a very simplisitic application. This is not a critisim of your coding abilities (after all, no one paid you to write any of these apps, and I still appreciate what you are doing). I do strongly believe that no matter how poorly a RAD developed application might be, it still beats an application that is never completed (or not in a reasonable timeframe). Some of the memory usage can be probably explained on uncontrollable factors (doesn't C# load a virtual machine?), but in the end it's still a useful app whose usefulness is almost elminated due to its very unreasonable memory usage.
After seeing this, I have a hard time imagining that giving a small team of developers, lets say 5 work days, to plan and write a simple connection monitor would be well worth the 10x cost in the long run. Whether the team gets the project done on time depends on whether the company elminates factors that slow down the team (such as micromanaging by non-programmers), not the model of programming (such as RAD).
You should read "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick Brooks from 1975. More recently you have "The Pragmatic Programmer" and "Practices of an Agile Developer". I think they all focus on how things can be done more efficiently and on the joy of programming, something large organizations manage to take away. But I believe (and hope) the Agile notion is getting momentum nowdays.
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