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It's nice to see the occasional reminder of this, among all the Web 2.0-ness around here :-) A lot of apps still need to run in the Dark Ages that are desktop

It's nice to see the occasional reminder of this, among all the Web 2.0-ness around here :-) A lot of apps still need to run in the Dark Ages that are desktop development, Balkanization and all.

tibbon 16y ago
This was also a major learning experience for me. I've mainly worked in Web 2.0-only companies that wouldn't dream of writing a desktop application. Everything is incredibly different from my PoV and many staples of modern web writing (functional tests, agile methodology, etc) can't be assumed in a desktop environment. I also had to get used to having less data about how our consumers use our product. I'm used to being able to ninja through apache logs and Google Analytics to figure stuff out, but our data is much more limited from our analytics package. Finally, finding killer developers to do desktop stuff is much harder than finding a Ruby or Python programmer. You're looking for people with specific expertise with somewhat strange problems that your average web programmer just isn't suited to handle such as memory leaks (I say this as someone who can hack in Ruby but I fail miserably at any desktop programming).
- bad_user 16y ago
  > (functional tests, agile methodology, etc) can't be assumed in a desktop environment. Why not? > You're looking for people with specific expertise with somewhat strange problems that your average web programmer just isn't suited to handle such as memory leaks There are many apps out there that are suitable to be desktop programs. That specific expertise you're talking about is probably being unafraid to do stuff people want, instead of just another Twitter clone. > I say this as someone who can hack in Ruby The term "hack" is certainly overused recently. It used to mean something on the borderline of being illegal, or some artful workaround that's done in the interest of cutting corners, or some mindbogglingly experiment (like the Tesla Coil). Not it's just related to meaning plain-old (and boring) programming. I blame the popularity of PG's essays for that ... yeah, we all want to be "hackers".

It's nice to see the occasional reminder of this, among all the Web 2.0-ness around here :-) A lot of apps still need to run in the Dark Ages that are desktop development, Balkanization and all.

tibbon 16y ago

This was also a major learning experience for me. I've mainly worked in Web 2.0-only companies that wouldn't dream of writing a desktop application. Everything is incredibly different from my PoV and many staples of modern web writing (functional tests, agile methodology, etc) can't be assumed in a desktop environment. I also had to get used to having less data about how our consumers use our product. I'm used to being able to ninja through apache logs and Google Analytics to figure stuff out, but our data is much more limited from our analytics package. Finally, finding killer developers to do desktop stuff is much harder than finding a Ruby or Python programmer. You're looking for people with specific expertise with somewhat strange problems that your average web programmer just isn't suited to handle such as memory leaks (I say this as someone who can hack in Ruby but I fail miserably at any desktop programming).

bad_user 16y ago
> (functional tests, agile methodology, etc) can't be assumed in a desktop environment. Why not? > You're looking for people with specific expertise with somewhat strange problems that your average web programmer just isn't suited to handle such as memory leaks There are many apps out there that are suitable to be desktop programs. That specific expertise you're talking about is probably being unafraid to do stuff people want, instead of just another Twitter clone. > I say this as someone who can hack in Ruby The term "hack" is certainly overused recently. It used to mean something on the borderline of being illegal, or some artful workaround that's done in the interest of cutting corners, or some mindbogglingly experiment (like the Tesla Coil). Not it's just related to meaning plain-old (and boring) programming. I blame the popularity of PG's essays for that ... yeah, we all want to be "hackers".