Work Smart

"If your page is just for you, and it's useless and bad, but you like it, that's fine. Keep it at http://localhost. It'll load faster."

-Unknown

This thread in Ask Joel is the most interesting discussion I've ever read abut offshoring/outsourcing software development!

It's getting incredibly long though, so it's really hard to read through. But the first 25 comments are definitely worth reading.

My personal take on the subject is roughly this: I believe software is art more than science. I think the best approach to make it look like engineering is something along the Unified Process - that's what the IT world has learned the hard way for the last 30 years! One golden rule of UP is to have the users and the coders communicating, to have them understand each other's constraints...

This doesn't mean I think nothing can be outsourced, but you certainly cannot carelessly offshore a whole IT department to a place with a radically different culture and expect that communicating with specs will "just work"! :|

If offshoring software development is ever going to succeed we'll need a whole new set of skills and tools (internet being one of them) to master it, and we're not even close! However, I think the experience of open source software projects developped by an international community are an interesting experience to this.

I would probably elaborate on this if I wasn't this busy reading the thread at Joel's right now! :>>

Every blogger gets to do that once in a lifetime (ahem, I mean at least once...): I searched for my firstname in search engines...

Surprisingly or not (depending on how much you know about web indexing techniques), I am famous, very very famous!

• #1 François in the world out of about 6,450,000 on yahoo.com
• #2 François in the world out of about 3,310,000 on google.com

What more could I ask for?

Real fame? nah... I just hope those rankings last long enough for me not to look stupid when you read this :p (Those rankings can actually change on a daily basis, so... yeah maybe cyberfame just works like real fame, one day you're at the top, the next day you're gone...)

As Russel [link gone] puts it: 2004 is the year of the mobile [applications]. (Okay, here in France, it might shift to 2005, but whatever...)

Of course, the two main markets here are:

• mobile games (play while commuting...)
• and mobile enterprise applications (sales forces empowerment/reporting...)

However, regarding enterprise applications, the equation is quite different. The targeted users often do not have a recent (smart)phone (they just don't care that much, as long as they can use their phone to call! :P) and even if they have: it doesn't matter! Actually, the cost of new phones with a specific technology will just be a fraction of the cost for the global distributed application. Therefore, Microsoft smartphones and Palm based smartphones are just as well positioned to be used for mobile enterprise applications! Actually, the advantage may go to the platform that provides the most efficient middleware/framework to speed up development!

Another question remains: while a color phone screen and a keypad are enough for playing games, we yet have to check what screen size and input method are appropriate to fill out forms. Maybe connected PDAs will prove more relevant... (just add a bluetooth headset for phone capabilities). Personally, I tend to think that smartphones with large screens (P900, Sendo X, 6600, SPV E200) will do the trick, but we really need a reality check here!

Sometimes I fear that Microsoft stopping the development of IE 6 is a lot worse than we think...

It looks more and more like they have a master plan beyond terminating the free browser program... (we don't care, we have open source browsers, right?)... Actually, it looks like they plan to terminate the browser concept itself.

With their .NET client technology, they actually intend to promote applications that directly and transparently connect to web-services. You don't "see" the internet any more. What you see, is the funky XP GUI interface of a native Windows application!

Once most online services will work only with their dedicated Windows client (yeah the providers don't care, that's 95% of their market anyway), what's the use of a free open source browser going to be? Oh yeah... it will let you browse the old, poorly maintained, "compatible" w-e-b-site (which already only works well in IE! :/)

Wow! Waking up... I just had a terrible nightmare! Luckily something like this could never happen... right?   right?

2015 update: something like this is actually happening with phone apps... Ironic? ... or did someone take a page out of Microsoft's early century book?