Let's make Software development exciting again.
Remember those university days and nights when we couldn't stop writing code? Remember when we could write a production ready application in days and could change the life of that guy who didn't even ask for an application in the first place? Remember that feeling of sadness and pride when we would finish coding and had to make the application go live? Remember how the sadness was replaced by joy and drive when a new idea would come spontaneously into our mind?
How often do we speak about that simple app which we wrote 10-15 years ago, which just works and is still heavily used? And how often we find ourselves trapped in that project which is still under development after a few years with demotivated developers, unhappy business and lost opportunities?
Is that drive gone? Is software development expensive, boring, confusing, complicated and lacking good coders? Why is it that some companies have teams of 50 to 100 developers and can't finish projects?
Why does the trend in the corporate world appear to be thinking about software development in terms of numbers of the developers cheaply hired in India? Why is it that some companies hope to save money on a large number of cheap developers end up paying more?
It doesn't have to be this way. Software development is now more interesting then ever! It is accessible on many platforms and technologies. We have new cool buzz words like IoT, AI, mobile, UWP, cloud, RAD, cross platform development and many more. It is exciting and innovative and it's time to find new ways to motivate developers and let that creative flow.
The Amdaris 24 hour hackathon proved this exact point. Within just 24 hours, five Amdaris teams produced five MVP's (minimal viable products), using five completely new technologies. The only limit was our imagination, time and the quantity of Red Bull which rapidly ran out!
I was proudly part of our Timisoara team. During 24 hours we had one idea generation and planning session, four scrums, lots of code and of course recording a show and tell video for our colleagues to see the result of our hard work. At the end of the session we were tired and excited, we couldn't go home until we watched what other teams had come up with - and every single team produced amazing applications.
Is a hackathon just a game and day to day life is different? According to Facebook many of their innovations are a results of hackathons. Google famously let their developers hack and innovate one day a week. Lots of companies will not sign off projects if the development is longer than 6 months and have more than 10 developers involved. Many companies focus their effort of innovation and collaboration between developers and business.
And it works, we proved this again and again in Amdaris delivering great innovative software to our customers.
Engaged and envisioned teams achieve great things - making software development exciting again.