I’m in the middle of working on some design concepts for another shotgunflat/thoughtbot joint, and for the first time in a very long time, the design started looking vaguely familiar—as it was unfolding. It was quite arresting at first. The thing that made it even more strange was that once I figured out where I recognized the design, it dawned on me that I was essentially plagiarizing work from my own past. It wasn’t intentional, it just sort of happened. The design from the past is not in use, so it’s not a very big deal, but it kind of caught me off guard.
I’ll have to change it to keep myself happy, but I wonder if there is any kind of ethical issue with this. Probably not, but an interesting situation nonetheless.
As you’ve might have noticed from our announcement on the thoughtbot home page we’ve recently made the decision that we will be standardizing on 2 development languages going forward.
In this post I think I’ll focus more on the business angle of this decision.
We felt strongly, after coming to the conclusion time and time again, that we were simply wasting time programming web applications in perl and php (see my previous post regarding MVC). That’s not in the best interest of our customers, and not in the best interest of our bottom line. Java (and EJB and Struts) and Ruby On Rails provide us with the framework to waste less time.
Ok, now for the big picture… it is absolutely critical – in fact, its part of our business model, to find ways to waste less time. By using and/or developing reusable components, frameworks, etc. it becomes possible to deliver better applications to our customers for less time and money. This principal needs to be applied to each level of the organization – beyond coding – to payroll, invoicing, mundane paperwork, and so on.
