3 ms·

The stuff that programmers are interested in usually have 10000 tools made already but if you look at other industries or hobbies there are a lot of people usin

The stuff that programmers are interested in usually have 10000 tools made already but if you look at other industries or hobbies there are a lot of people using crappy expensive tools. A few times I have found areas where no tool exists like a few months ago I needed a ruby library that could download a picture from stitched together OSM tiles and nothing did that. You can pretty easily find an area where you can easily be the only/best open source tool for the job and there are a lot of people who will use your tool just because it's open source.

JohnBooty 8y ago
This is very true. And to be honest, there are actually piles and piles of money just waiting to be made this way. We (as an industry) are trying to invent flying cars and the world's 482,382nd social networking app with zero revenue model and other crap crap like that. Meanwhile, your dentist's office is using software that sucks, probably costs $20K a year, and looks like Microsoft Office 2K3 threw up all over their computer screen. But we ignore that, in favor of creating yet another new Javascript framework-of-the-week or something else the world doesn't even remotely need. I'm currently working at a privately-owned company that makes software for one of these unsexy niches and they're making very solid money. They're literally the only one making software in this space. It will never be a billion dollar space, and probably never a $100mil space, but there is a need and a market of companies willing to pay well for this software.
- ozim 8y ago
  Yes developers are quite narrow sighted, we nag about how silly interviews in our area are, we don't even know what is it like to be interviewed as chemical engineer for example. Follow up with that we get bunch of startups and tools from developers for developers because that is what we focus on. Where making small tool for some other profession could be even more interesting than trying to write better left pad or another package manager for javascript. But also people in different fields have to use some stuff from 10 years ago or god forbid from previous century like 90's and you don't want to get dirty.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    We are probably the only industry in history that has expended such a high % of our time making tools for ourselves! but maybe that's natural for such a young industry?

JohnBooty 8y ago

This is very true. And to be honest, there are actually piles and piles of money just waiting to be made this way. We (as an industry) are trying to invent flying cars and the world's 482,382nd social networking app with zero revenue model and other crap crap like that. Meanwhile, your dentist's office is using software that sucks, probably costs $20K a year, and looks like Microsoft Office 2K3 threw up all over their computer screen. But we ignore that, in favor of creating yet another new Javascript framework-of-the-week or something else the world doesn't even remotely need. I'm currently working at a privately-owned company that makes software for one of these unsexy niches and they're making very solid money. They're literally the only one making software in this space. It will never be a billion dollar space, and probably never a $100mil space, but there is a need and a market of companies willing to pay well for this software.

ozim 8y ago
Yes developers are quite narrow sighted, we nag about how silly interviews in our area are, we don't even know what is it like to be interviewed as chemical engineer for example. Follow up with that we get bunch of startups and tools from developers for developers because that is what we focus on. Where making small tool for some other profession could be even more interesting than trying to write better left pad or another package manager for javascript. But also people in different fields have to use some stuff from 10 years ago or god forbid from previous century like 90's and you don't want to get dirty.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  We are probably the only industry in history that has expended such a high % of our time making tools for ourselves! but maybe that's natural for such a young industry?