Jody/Kirk, I have been following this thread closely, and I am really enthusiastic about providing value to my clients as they trust us with their businesses.
Though it is harder to keep software products simple and maintained, the quality products have longer life cycle (Avoiding software entropy) and eventually make more money . Sometimes adding stupid features is important to play in the market, get out in the market faster. Sometimes doing less is more profitable than doing a lot more and not doing it right. As we know, It is harder to make software applications simple - we all need better tools to keep going continuously. This is nature of the beast! *Choose the right **people** - **developers and operations team**!* It depends on how Developers work and their objectives are. Some developers are working as one man band companies, some have grown into a team. A lot of is about how Developer thinks? and in my opinion it has to come from the top - CxOs must be on the same page as the operations team down the chart. It is about the work ethics and culture - every one has to work towards a single goal - Developers and Operations working together; their is even a modern term for this way of working - #DevOps. I presented a session (my first one actually) at the 4DSummit this year @ Portland - Building a faster deployment platform for 4D and I have had mixed response. I changed the name of session serval times as it was about Automation. Automate everything in the CI/CD pipeline. Some of the developers really liked it and understood why we should automate everything. For some it was not relevant they thought but I think once every step in the entire end-to-end process is automated the benefits are huge - quality & more efficient releases consistently. Development & Testing teams can save a lot of time. I wonder why every developer will have different results for the same job/task. One developer may charge $800 a day but can achieve so much that client can benefit from it for years to come, doing it quickly as opposed to another developer who charges may be less but takes a lot longer to provide same feature. and leave the code in such a way no one else can pick it up and re-factor eventually end up costing a lot more than an efficient fellow developer. *Choose the right tools!* We are trying to achieve perfection - we should believe in doing it once, test it, ship it and then forget about it. Also putting the right tools to keep things simple and automate everything!!! Most of us are moving our apps to Cloud now. I have done one app - https://www.tenthmatrix.co.uk/img2d the data is all on cloud but we still have power of 4D UI - all built with Rest APIs - Lesson learnt is no other product can offer faster and more cost effective solutions than 4D platform. I am working to release *Deploy4D* component v2 soon with Cloud Application Strategy in mind, (note: v1 is on GitHub https://github.com/bwalia/deploy4d already, try it) and while doing v2 these discussions are very helpful to understand how development trends are changing (if they are). I think one thing lacking in 4D Dev World is to be able to create app using open source apps/libraries quickly. Lack of open source 4D apps/components. In open source DevOps world their are config management tools such as Ansible,Puppet, Chef, Urban Code Deploy and Boomi etc. to automate the entire stack Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) - testing to final release. Distributed Apps to Cloud Apps. I am planning to add config management system in Deploy4D soon so thanks for bring this topic up - Real world problems and Real world solutions. Perhaps the topic of my next presentation should be #DevOps for 4D World. Enjoy the weekend! Balinder On 15 September 2016 at 22:33, Kirk Brooks <[email protected]> wrote: > Jody, > Great response to Tom's question. Every point you made rings completely > true in my experience as well. > > I would add, from some limited experience with some similarly long lived > projects that haven't chosen to refactor, the maintenance costs really go > up. It's said a lot that code spends more time in maintenance than > production. Becoming familiar with old code bases takes a lot of time and > that time is replicated often. This also leads to bloated, opaque old code > involving numerous techniques. After a while attempting to make even simple > changes becomes difficult and time consuming. > > You know, this would make a great topic for a summit presentation or > roundtable. > > -- > Kirk Brooks > San Francisco, CA > ======================= > ********************************************************************** > 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) > FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html > Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html > Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech > Unsub: mailto:[email protected] > ********************************************************************** > ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
