4 ms·

I worked for a company that was making a large CASE tool way back when and even at the time it felt like nonsense. Internally it never even crossed our minds t

I worked for a company that was making a large CASE tool way back when and even at the time it felt like nonsense. Internally it never even crossed our minds to use it as a means of building the tools themselves. I remember bringing this up at one point during a company meeting and the CEO glowered at me like I was pointing out some inconstancy in religious theology. He spun some web of garbage about why it wasn't appropriate for our specific needs. I was young and realized only afterward that it was just not something you were supposed to mention there. It was actually fun to work on for a while and we sold a lot of product, but it eventually dried up along with the rest of that part of the industry.

agumonkey 5y ago
Some IBMers told me they never used any rational modeling technique for any software. I wonder if this was the case everywhere in the company.
dehrmann 5y ago
> Internally it never even crossed our minds to use it as a means of building the tools themselves Obviously, this doesn't apply to everything, but that's definitely a smell for product-market fit.
specialist 5y ago
I had similar experience at a Semantic Web startup. > I was young and realized only afterward... If I could give young me any single piece of advice, it'd be "OMG STFU. Just smile and cash the check."
- jsight 5y ago
  I'm curious how it relates to your startup. None of your data lived in a semantic db?
  - specialist 5y ago
    You'd've thought so. Persisted to SQL-Server. Early 2000s, so totally impractical. The CTO cofounder was not impressed by the UI guy asking out loud what every one was thinking. The fancy pants UI I was tasked to create wasn't even backed by a query language or path expressions. So dumb. I stayed just long enough to find another gig. PS- I did storyboard and wireframed a novel UI which resolved the graph visualization "paradox" (aka "focus+context"). It'd be perfect for neo4j & Cypher. I always thought I'd eventually circle back, if only to see if the idea had legs. Oh well.
krasicki 5y ago
I worked on a number of CASE tools and worked with them. You will NEVER see any diagrams describing the tools or how they were built. Eating one's own dog food was not part of the road map.

agumonkey 5y ago

Some IBMers told me they never used any rational modeling technique for any software. I wonder if this was the case everywhere in the company.

dehrmann 5y ago

> Internally it never even crossed our minds to use it as a means of building the tools themselves Obviously, this doesn't apply to everything, but that's definitely a smell for product-market fit.

specialist 5y ago

I had similar experience at a Semantic Web startup. > I was young and realized only afterward... If I could give young me any single piece of advice, it'd be "OMG STFU. Just smile and cash the check."

jsight 5y ago
I'm curious how it relates to your startup. None of your data lived in a semantic db?
- specialist 5y ago
  You'd've thought so. Persisted to SQL-Server. Early 2000s, so totally impractical. The CTO cofounder was not impressed by the UI guy asking out loud what every one was thinking. The fancy pants UI I was tasked to create wasn't even backed by a query language or path expressions. So dumb. I stayed just long enough to find another gig. PS- I did storyboard and wireframed a novel UI which resolved the graph visualization "paradox" (aka "focus+context"). It'd be perfect for neo4j & Cypher. I always thought I'd eventually circle back, if only to see if the idea had legs. Oh well.

krasicki 5y ago

I worked on a number of CASE tools and worked with them. You will NEVER see any diagrams describing the tools or how they were built. Eating one's own dog food was not part of the road map.