I seem to be suffering from a form of ADD recently. Hopefully it’s not the kind I’ll need Ritalin for although I haven’t actually checked with a doctor yet. But this is a special kind of ADD, technology ADD.
After living a lifetime stuck in a bit of a technology trap, using what everyone else seemed to be using and what recruiters wanted to see on your CV I’ve suddenly been opened up to a world of promising technologies. In the past month I’ve not only carried on writing in Ruby on Rails but have also started using Django, a full on web framework which is powered by Python.
A lot of people, my previous self included, would tend to call these new web frameworks lightweight and not suitable for really serious applications. I still haven’t quite made my mind up if this statement holds any merit but maybe a better question would be does the application you are working on have to be “serious” anyway. By serious here I mean seriously built. Does it need to scale horizontally at the flick of a switch, will you be dealing with billion row tables and processing 6,000 requests a second? They’ll probably answer that one day they might. That’s true, although only if they manage to launch without sucking up their funds building a project in a serious fashion.
Case in point about two years ago I tried a personal project in Java. Java’s what I know best so it seemed a sensible option. Professionally I work on a robust codebase with a great Spring / Hibernate base, full on integration testing, custom authentication code and a beautiful Ant based build environment. But I also forgot that the environment took 5 smart people 2 months to set up. Admittedly I now knew the general setup but it was hard work being disciplined and trying to write so much from scratch, in my SPARE TIME. The initial setup must have taken 6 months. I had lost all enthusiasm for it by that point.
Two weeks ago I started a project in Django. I didn’t even know Python. In a week of spare time work I’ve got a fully working database model, authentication framework, frontend with templating. I’d estimate I might have spent about the same time drawing pretty pictures for the frontend as writing backend code. That is truly astounding. I was impressed with Ruby on Rails but this is another level. Webapps can be coded in less time than it would take you to draw a UML diagram or database hierarchy.
The best thing is it has brought back my enthusiasm and hopes for personal projects. When writing something in your spare time, the best thing you can do is finish something. Don’t obsess over perfect theoretical programming practices, scalability and how you’re going to track sessions across multiple servers when you haven’t even got something launched. Obviously if you’ve got £1,000,000 and know your app is going to be huge, build everything as well as you can. For the rest of us I’d suggest speed is the more important factor.
Leave a Reply