Pieces of functionality
Recently I’ve switched my blog engine from Wordpress to a semi-custom solution based on static files generated by Jekyll. Nothing interesting: it’s only a technical choice after all, but that faced me to some considerations.
- Using a “one-fit-all” solution is not always the best choice, it’s easy when you wanto to start (quickly) with something cheaply available, but it became soon difficult to manage when you want to customize something. Having to follow all the module updates with the main package (wordpress) can be annoying: all I want is to publish some content.
- Content we publish doesn’t live in one place: we use Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, Twitter… and even our old blog: I need also a content aggregator (mainly to trace it from a single place).
- So the main idea appeared in my mind: we can’t live no more in a world of single (web)application that try to fit all needs.
Each pieces of functionality is (best) served by someone.
And this reminds me on the excellent book ”My job went to India” by Chad Fowler where he points out the fact that the software products we made exhibit a strong parallelism with our careers: the product is made up of you and your skills.
The four facets we have to look at when building software are:
- choose your market
- invest in you product
- execute
- market!
I’d like to report more thoughts of mine about that in future posts.
Picture from Shahrashoob