One Night Stand

In a recent interview, I was discussing the merits of various approaches to web development.

Its a well worn argument – technical excellence versus commercial reality.
The fastest way to build any site is to hack together a few components, adding a bit of polish to the front end to make it look good. Cost effective, fast, and any competent developer can do it. The developer might feel a little dirty while they’re doing it, but hey, that’s what they get paid for.

Its a strategy best described as find em, f*** em, forget em.
From a marketing point of view, its commercial suicide.

Its a one night stand.

If you’re lucky, the client won’t notice, and won’t feel used after you’re done. Any marketeer will tell you that good marketing relies on converting your clients into fans. That’s not likely to happen after a one night stand.

What if it does though?
Say the client is really happy and wants to establish a ongoing relationship?

This is the point when your quick and easy hacking bites you, big time. Even an experienced developer won’t have an easy time of understanding code they wrote at light speed, a month or two later, especially if they never expected to ever revisit the code. Invariably you will have throw away the existing code, and start again from scratch. That’s no problem though, because you’ll do it the same way as you did before.
You’ll charge them the same way as you did before (or lose money), even if the functional changes aren’t particularly great.

Effectively another one night stand.
And another opportunity to not only lose the client, but convert them into an anti-fan.

How I was indoctrinated in Objected Oriented Programming by Gaxygar

When I was running the ghetto streets of Pirbright at 8 or 9 or 10 I really did get shook when my older brother got me hooked…

It was the 70′s, when personal computing was just a splinter in the mind’s eye of comedy double act Alan and Clive, and the world’s first commercial role playing game was spreading through the land and the only limit was your imagination.

This game featured actors of different classes that collaborated to form a party. While all of the classes shared some common properties, they were also specialised, which lead to different behaviours and roles within the party. In any given session the actors could acquire various objects that decorated them with new properties and behaviours, or adapted the ones they already had.

Of course in an actual session someone had to be responsible for describing the view of the environment that they had created. Handily the game provided a framework for modelling the environment and rules for handling all the various events that could happen during a session, and the book-keeping necessary between sessions.

All of this involved lots numbers transcribed in scripts, along with the core rules and various desirable supplemental add-ons. It was an open ended game, so naturally other, similar frameworks catering to particular areas of interest quickly emerged. There was fierce debate amongst the various players over specific rules, frameworks and methodologies using the communications media prevalent at the time.

If you stepped back, and took a high level view of all of this, you’d see small close-knit groups talking to each other an awful lot, having their conversation, yet they were each loosely connected to a vast network of similar groups. Of course there was commercialisation, and the most influential groups profited.

30 years later people don’t write fanzines or letters to in-house magazines, they write blogs, post to forums, send emails and texts and tweets…

I’ve lost my original focus on OOP and shifted somewhat into social media. I used to be very focussed on OOP. But its just a means to an end, and that end is always interaction between people. It’s the subjective quality of the shared experience that people care about, not what was involved in making it happen.

Of course that last statement’s not entirely true, just mostly true.

Extra points if you can name the track paraphrased in the first sentence.

Bramble and Bug

Bramble and Bug are another company started by an ex-employee of DriveBusiness.

They have a proprietary platform written in classic ASP.

I took my own equipment to the office to use.

I hadn’t touched ASP since I discovered PHP (so about 6 years), but my boss assured me I’d be fine with it.

The relationship soured rapidly when I asked him to pay me.

I was there about a month, and he still owes me money too.