Bob On Development

This has been an exciting week for developers, particularly Microsoft-oriented web developers. The MIX07 conference in Lost Wages is in full swing and there are a lot of interesting (and some unexpected) announcements coming out of that. List servers and blog sites are creaking under the load of breathless descriptions of all these new technologies — especially Silverlight.

In the meantime one of my RSS feeds reminded me of Ray Kurzwiel and his rosy predictions about how mankind is about to take a quantum leap in evolution through technology — computer, biotech, and nanotech. By the midpoint of this century he asserts confidently that we will all be hybrid biological / computer organisms and will achieve things like immortality and the ability to upload our consciousness to computers. Kruzweil says this will all be enabled by an event called the Singularity, wherein every $1000 worth of computer hardware will have more processing capacity than all the human brains on earth.

All of this in a world where a thirty-year “war on cancer” has failed to produce any widespread cure, we can’t seem to launch a spacecraft without a fair probability that it will blow up, the insurance company keeps “losing” our claims, and I can’t get stable 32-bit video drivers for Vista? Give me a break!

Is it just me, or is all of this techno cheer-leading just a bit overwrought?

One thing technologists are prone to forget over and over again is that the marketplace can only absorb new technology so fast. Right now, for example, I’m juggling the following:

• A firm that’s hired me to support an application that scrubs data from hundreds of sources, and puts it in their production database, from which they sell complicated reports. In the process port it from classic ASP / VBScript / FoxPro to C# / .NET.
• Two firms that pay me to do server admin and development work. One has a web presence that is only marginally profitable and is basically mired in classic ASP, and struggling to move to .NET. The other is running a dated version of DNN and struggling to update to the current release.
• A firm that is paying me to add features to a VB.NET WinForms app for construction estimating.
• A firm that has a small web site on a shared host and has me tweak a form once in awhile.
• A startup expecting to sell boring reports to business decision makers, consisting of columns of numbers and rudimentary graphs.

Now … I ask you. Who among these real-world customers gives a rip about spinning cubes and compiled client-side code? I’m sorry, but most line-of-business developers are just putting one foot in front of the other and trying to Get Work Done (before deadline).

Where do the superstars of development find the time to chase all these rainbows? Most of them are young, many are single, and the most visible ones are, in general, very smart. For the slower, older guys like me, though … I learn new technology for the most part when a client actually needs it and can in some direct or indirect way pay me to learn it. When I have “spare time” (ha!) I might spare a few minutes for my wife or even myself. I might (gasp!) do something unrelated to computers. I have all these great intentions to sit up reading Silverlight Unleashed or XAML Exposed but I usually fall asleep by the end of chapter 1.

Sorry, folks, that’s the Real World. I confess that the Dynamic Language Runtime and some aspects of Silverlight, and the ability to play with Ruby all interest me, and I will no doubt benefit from them at some point. But I’m just not going to drop everything and re-tool for them, and neither are most of us.

I’ve never been asked to put elaborate Silverlight-style pyrotechnics into a business application. If it catches on as a fad, everyone will want it, whether they need it or not, but in the meantime, I’ve got a deadline tonight involving some really boring and somewhat dated technology.