On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > Dave wrote: >>> Since my first goal is to write something for my animal rights group that >>> I can maintain easily, I'm really only interested in doing it "my way" for >>> now. > > Bob and Xaiver have been debating whether Dave's approach is good. I > have a nuanced view about. > > The reason Dave saying the text quoted above didn't bother me is that > I've known Dave for a long time, and know that he's capable of a certain > skill -- which I don't have a phrase for exactly -- but it's something > like "scratching your own itch with an eye to the future". > > Meaning this: I think when a developer like Dave "scratches his own > itch" he tends to write code that is easily generalizable. Therefore, I > have high hopes for Rapport2 that it *will* be extensible and applicable > to new situations because Dave is highly likely to make good design > choices that don't shut out extensibility.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. As I said before, my second goal is to build something that I can turn into a hosted service, so obviously I'm trying to build something that's useful to more than one organization. However, my use case is a bit different from some others discussed here. I'm not, at least initially, going to have any sort of "extra" functionality for classes, ticket sales, etc. Similarly, I'm not targeting organizations with complex financial arrangements like an umbrella organization would have. My target is smaller organizations that get a lot of individual donations, and who need to track information about donors in order to do better fundraising. Eventually, I'm interested in adding other things, like actually integrating with payment systems, event coordination, etc., but that's all in the future. As far as making it extensible, at this point I'm more concerned with making what I am doing as polished as possible. Again, this goes back to my interest in actually making money off this thing. That means building a piece of software that's easy to use, looks good, and satisfies the needs of some chunk of the market. I'm certainly not going to build it so as to rule out future expansions, but pluggability and such are not high priorities. Future features will probably be tightly integrated into the existing code, because this is the only way to maintain that high level of ease of use and polish that I think is crucial for a hosted service. Basically, this will be opinionated software, which means it will probably never be all things to all people. Instead, I hope it's the absolute best option for _some_ people (preferable, people with enough money to pay for service ;) -dave /*============================================================ http://VegGuide.org http://blog.urth.org Your guide to all that's veg House Absolute(ly Pointless) ============================================================*/ _______________________________________________ software mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.flossfoundations.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations-software
