Software’s ‘Go-To Guy’
Sophistication, complexity of applications require ‘generalist’ developers who do many things
By Geoff Koch
December 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 7)
There’s a subtle but persistent undercurrent in technology today about the waxing of smart-but-flexible generalists and the waning of hyper-focused specialists. Sports fans out there might best understand it by way of a baseball-inspired metaphor, if you’ll forgive a nod to the boys of summer here in the early days of winter. Software’s designated hitters who do little more than, say, maintain the mail server, are very much out. Switch-hitting speedsters—who can administer databases, build and maintain Web sites, write client-side apps and move easily up and down the LAMP stack—are decidedly in.
Other readers might consider this relatively recent and certainly more coherent rant on the topic from Philip Nelson, a Wisconsin-based developer who maintains the blog “An Active Coder.”
“Most of us have had the misfortune to work on teams that were structured in specialist silos,” wrote Nelson in an April 30, 2006, posting. The antidote, he said, is for managers to make sure coding teams remain relatively diverse and for individual programmers to cultivate at least basic familiarity with technologies—including databases—well beyond their comfort zones.
“The dreaded DBA [database administrator] pops up in my mind right away,” Nelson complained. “Having to deliver projects where you need to coordinate a DBA, install team, Web designer, systems analyst and security experts is painful and inefficient.”
Luckily for developers working in either Microsoft or Java environments, database programming and administration is becoming slightly less opaque. Details vary, but common trends in each of the big three integrated development environments—Visual Studio, Eclipse and the surprisingly resurgent NetBeans—include making it simpler to deal with different data types, to establish connections to a variety of SQL databases, and to abstract the complexity of arcane SQL syntax and instead work visually with tables and rows, or even with higher-level entities.
What’s behind these changes?
“The environment in which we are all developing applications has clearly gotten more sophisticated,” said David Straus, senior vice president at Corticon Technology in Redwood City, Calif., citing increased business dependence on IT, more distributed usage and more data sources as examples. Corticon offers a business rules modeling environment that exists as an integrated tool within a variety of IDEs, including Eclipse.
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