Software Development from Ryan

There's lots of great development tools coming out and a lot of interest in building services for people. There is also the "build it and they will come" mentality everywhere.

More often than not it doesn't seem to work. Fold.com has recently closed its doors because it couldn't keep up with competion. Micheal Arrington's comment on fold.com's closing has a good point about building applications:

"Well, the inevitable is starting to happen - a few new web startups are starting to close up shop as they find that building an application is a lot easier than getting users to try it out, and keep coming back" - Micheal Arrington

Innovation in development tools and techniques has a value ceiling. I had a discussion on Joshua Wehners blog this week about the excitement behind Ruby on Rails and why people should not be so excited. Micheal Arringtons point clarifies this again. Technology can get very good, allowing you to make better apps, but everyone is going to be making better apps. There are a lot of areas beyond the tool that you use that you could use to differentiate yourself from the competition to attract people and retain members.

 I've been playing around with different techniques over the  last month. On whirlpad.com, a free travel blogging service I built earlier this year, I introduced a Travel IQ test called the TQ test. It measures your travel knowledge by having you match photos of toilets from around the world to their location. With a bit of seeding this test consistently brings 1000 uniques per day. This is quite a bit more than the homepage of whirlpad.com.

The interesting thing here is that the bottleneck to creating more tests, and getting more traffic is not the technology, RoR or LAMP. They really don't matter. The important work is in the creative effort to develop the test. The travel blogging service, however, has a lot more development work than marking/PR/people-attracting work. 

Being a good developer and usuing the greatest newest technology is not enough anymore. Besides, that type of work can be easily outsourced. Just because its easy for me to grow tomatoes in my backyard doesn't mean I should start a business around it.

I like hearing about new techniques when it comes to software development. I'm very open about new ways to do things and evaluate them critically. Startups, on the other hand, look for things that people are most excited about. This makes sense. It's much easier to convince VC's when there is buzz. Unfortunately, over the last year or so this buzz has been about not the the product but the technology used to build the product. Ruby on Rails is The way to write web services. Here is an interesting semi-critical article on "Reasons Why Your Startup Should Use Ruby On Rails". 

I'm sure RoR is as great to use as most people say but its still just a language and framework…. just like all the other options. Another 3G language. There are no truly fundamental differences. I'm a little worried when someone thinks that it will solve all of their previous problems. It reminds me a bit of when VB came out and it was easy to write a simple windows app… and everyone thought they were a windows developer for about a year or two. In reality, once the buzz dies down RoR will at be an initial contributor of more efficient web development methodologies. That's it. And the framework/language with the most money behind it will most likely win.

Besides, its just a tool. Some linguistics research searchs for an optimal human language, which is cool, but the stuff more important than syntax and semantics is the creativity and expression in literature that an individual creates.