Bagel Belly Blog

On Ranting

I nearly pulled my developer engagement rant from the publish queue yesterday, since Aral did a much more eloquent job of describing the problems of working with developers. But I'd been working on it for quite some time, basically jotting down frustrations and annoyances after each developer event I went to. A colleague convinced me there were enough points of differentiation to make it worth publishing as well. So it's finally hit the wires.

Still - I highly recommend you go read Aral's post:

Let me use the tools and technologies I already know instead of forcing me to learn a whole new set. Give me some open web technologies to play with and I might just stay the night.

Excellent.

Incidentally, it's not all bad - one event I went to had two highly passionate and entertaining speakers (to quote someone: "their talk was fucking ace"). Another event saw me whipping up a widget using standards-based technologies (XML, JSON, HTML, CSS) and easily deploying over bluetooth. But there's still an uphill struggle most of the time, even though it's not rocket science to get this right.