Developing Your Own Software Can Give You a Commercial Advantage #NationalCodingWeek

It’s National Coding Week and I was asked to write something about coding (or software development as it’s often called). I decided I’d write about why developing your own software can give you a commercial or competitive advantage over other companies who are stuck using off-the-shelf software. Bearing in mind the gospel-according-to-simon-sinek, I’ll also talk about why I love coding.

But let’s start at the beginning - with “when”.

I was half-way though high school when the school got it’s first computer - a Research Machines 380Z.

A few months before that, one of our teachers had brought in his own home computer and showed some basic video games. The handful of us who were nerdy enough to be interested naturally wanted to know what games it had. “None” was the answer, “you’ll need to write your own”. None of us 14-15 year old’s knew the first thing about computers, let alone how to write software. However, the challenge was accepted and the Woodlands High School Computer Club was born. It came with the perk of not having to be out in the rain at break times, but with the downside of the occasional kicking for being weird. Now the "weirdos" make the world work.

We set our bar high - to write our own version of the arcade game “Defender” using the BASIC language and a computer that had a colour pallet comprising black and green (which would later be upgraded to black plus 16 shades of green). I think we did a pretty good job. Everyone wanted to play it.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 which had just 1k of memory.

I decided pretty quickly that a career in writing software was what I wanted. After school I attended Glasgow College of Technology (where we learned languages such as BASIC, COBOL, dBASE and C). From there I worked for a small software house, a bank and a life company before starting my own business in 1991.

Something I quickly figured out was that what you were taught at college wasn’t enough and you had to do a lot of self learning. By the time we did C at college, I was already reasonably proficient. That’s something that’s stuck with me all though my career. In my opinion it’s what elevates someone into being a great developer - they’ll code just to learn new skills, sometimes just for fun or out of curiosity and it will excite them. These are the people that will write you great software.

So what can you do with a coder, or a team of coders? Pretty much anything you can envision to be honest.

There was a time where people would ask for things and the technology wasn’t quite there. Over the last few years and particularly since the Internet arrived, there’s very little from a business perspective you couldn’t do with software.

Some people will dissuade you from writing software. They’ll claim you’ll have problems with upgrades, you’ll always be working on it, developers are hard to manage and expensive and you can get everything you could possibly want using standard software and definitely no customisations. In some scenarios, all of these could be true. Yet, these same people would tell you to stay in employment and not start a business because it’s hard and you might fail. These are also true, yet here you are.

Writing custom or bespoke software for your business can give you a number of advantages. These include being able to move faster or deliver a better service than your competitors because your software is completely tailored to your specific needs or way of working. It might allow you to keep your head-count lower because you don’t need to employ people to do mundane administrative tasks. There’s nothing worse than seeing people copying data from one application and pasting into another. Well, OK, there is worse - printing out and typing back in. That still happens.

You also don’t have to write massive applications from scratch that run your whole business. Sometimes it’s about integrating (or gluing together) systems to make the transfer of data more efficient. That can save time and improve accuracy (no more miss-keyed data). Things also don’t grind to a halt when someone’s off.

I’ll wrap up by talking briefly about some of the software I’ve written personally, or my company has written. Since I started I’ve been taking customers’ ideas and visions and turning them into software applications. The variety has been huge and from a career perspective I’ve loved it.

In my role as CEO, there’s not so much time for coding. I don’t do customer facing work, but I still manage to work on our IT monitoring and analytics system, SentiLAN as well as some of our internal software tools we use to make us more efficient. Our company finances are held in Sage, but I wanted one big spreadsheet with some nice analytics/graphs, the data presented in a different way and the ability to toggle projections on/off. I dislike Excel (a lot) but I stuck with this for a while - until I decided it was taking way too much time and very prone to mistakes (because the formulas were complex). So I replaced it. With the same spreadsheet. This time I had a custom application sitting in the middle. It reads the data from Sage and actually writes the spreadsheet for me. Not an import/export, but it actually puts the data into the correct cells, writes the formulas and finally does a lot of the cell colours/highlighting. Now each month it’s a 10 minute job.

SentiLAN looks after around 600 file servers and all the associated IT plumbing and applications they are servicing. It processes around 4 million IT system measurements round the clock, every day of the year. It’s our eyes on what’s going on with our customers’ systems and what needs to be looked at or fixed. I designed this and wrote large portions of it.

Out in the world of our customers, we have a staff rostering system which schedules thousands of shifts a week. It’s interfaced to a 3CX phone system which provides staff with the ability to log on/off shifts. It handles tens of thousands of calls a week. Our customer decided to develop this software because it gives them a competitive advantage. When they are bidding for work, it’s part of their sales pitch. They now have an internal development team too with whom we collaborate on continually improving this software.

We also have a pallet labelling system that was designed and developed by Exmos. It runs in factories all over the world, is multi-lingual and can deal with time zones. It prints tens of millions of labels every year.

Lastly, "why"?

There's something hugely satisfying about sitting at a computer, writing code that to the layman looks like gibberish, then watching amazing things happen and problems being solved when you run that code. Who wouldn't want that experience?