This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Situated Software
I re-read Clay Shirky's piece on Situated Software on my way into work today. It echoes my interest in small software projects. This interest of mine is ironic because I spend most of my work life working on a huge multi-instituiton course management system, designed for hundreds of thousands of users I'll never meet.
But I still love the projects we do in EDDG for smaller clients like SMA and CRE which have an intended audience of a few hundred. They are nice products, that people really use and enjoy. And the projects end - it's really nice when a project ends.
I bore my colleagues with this mantra, but I continually wish we could do these smaller projects using "LAMP" (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP[or Python maybe])as a platform instead of "STOJ" (as in "stodgy" - Solaris + Tomcat + Oracle + Java[it's probably not rally solaris any more - but changing that would ruin my acronym]). It would be a lot esier for less supremely skilled web developers (like myself) to work on these projects, they'd be easier to maintain and faster and cheaper to build.