It is a GREAT time to be a Developer

26Aug/050

Wally, points out that it’s a good time to be a developer. I disagree, I think it’s a GREAT time to be a developer. And not just because I’m into one-upsmanship, I have more reasons than Wally does.

A plethora of development tools – you might not like all of them, but you have to admit it’s nice to have a lot of choices. Where would TDD and the XP methodology be without Ant/NAnt and JUnit/NUnit? If you want to develop OS X applications, Apple GIVES you a nice toolset for free. Visual Studio, the .NET years, started out rough but gets better with every release. Java-heads have Eclipse, IntelliJ, JPad, and many more.

Ruby on Rails – RoR is igniting the web development world like nothing has since….well the first release of ASP.NET or the dot com boom. A lot of new frameworks based on the RoR mantra of “painless web development” are coming about.

Google – Google has done more for developers in the past 3 years than any tool has in the last 30. The ability to quickly find information whether it’s located in a weblog, an MSDN KB, a newsgroup, or (if you sign up to a lot of mailing lists using a GMail account or use a desktop search engine) email.

Open Source Software – Yeah you may think it’s all crap or that it’ll never be as good as commercial software. But the fact that new developers, and old ones, can look at other peoples code and learn from it is a great boon.

Weblogs – As much as I hate to admit it, weblogs have done a LOT for developers. I mean, friggin’ Don Box, Grady Booch, and Martin Fowler have web logs. And more importantly they POST to them. You get fresh content and thoughts from some of the brighter minds in software development.

APIs, APIs, APIs – Google has a set of APIs for almost every product they release. Don’t forget about Yahoo’s APIs. MSN Virtual Earth has a developer center with more to come I’m sure. Flickr, Blogger, Delicious, all come with APIs.

I remember a long dry spell, oddly enough during the dot com boom/bust, where all of the tech companies were keeping their cards close to their vest and their APIs even closer. Interoperability meant that one companys program worked with every other product that company produced and no one elses. I think those times are gone. It’s a GREAT time to be a developer.