Today after a very long time of waiting I've finally reached the age where I have the answer and I'm happy to say that Douglas Adams was correct it really is 42.
So for those of you that are still waiting I'd like to tell you that it really is true and life really is that simple.
In his now infamous book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S Raymond wrote "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."
- Once you've started scratching does the itch go away?
- Do you reach a point where the itch has gone but the software is not complete.
- If you do what happens next?
Writing a new piece of software can be hard work and time consuming. You slave away at it in your spare time for days, weeks, months and even years until it works the way you need it to.
A few months ago I joined the dark side and bought a Mac because I had an idea to build an iPhone app for one of my largest clients.
I'm not a programmer although I like to think I am quite good at reading code and hacking it, I just don't have the skills to start from scratch.
But my app was fairly basic, really not much more than an on-line book, so how hard could it be? Surely I would be able to re-use some of the skills I have learnt over the years with Joomla.
With my shiny new Mac I downloaded the iPhone SDK, bought a few books, installed the IDE and stared at the blank screen not knowing where to start.
As with so many things in life this looked destined to be one of those ideas that never came to fruition. So I put the iPhone development on the back-burner and moved on to other projects.
Where do I begin…
There are so many reasons to have quality content on your website and your reputation is #1. Without a clear and effective message, you will lose visitors.
Take a step back and really look at your website’s home page. Just the home page. What do you see? If you landed here inadvertently- would you know what the business or service is that the owner is providing. Are you the intended audience for such services? If you are a potential client, do you know what to do next?
Now that might seem like a strange thing to say but if you don't fail at some things then it means that "you are not trying hard enough".
If we always take the "safe" option that has guaranteed success then we will never truly move on and progress.
When I started this blog, and it took a lot of convincing to do it, I took a decision that this blog would not be the usual Joomla blog.
My intention is to write articles that are of interest to a wide audience and to not only provide "tips and tricks" and republished "product news" but also to write articles that are "challenging and make you really think".
On Friday I did something that I never thought I would ever do. I bought a Mac. To be more exact I bought one of the new aluminium Mac Book Pro.
I've been a PC user for more years than I like to remember and although I have dabbled with OS X on occasions in the past I have never before succumbed.
Right now I feel a little bit like Adam being tempted to take a bite out of the apple by Eve, I just hope it doesn't lead to the same result.
So what made me take the leap?
Release early - release often or release once when it is ready?
It is often quoted that an open source project, like Joomla, should release early and release often as this is the best method to find bugs and provide new features.
However I believe that is an overly simplistic approach and does not translate to real world use in all but the simplest, single use projects and definitely not for Joomla.
As soon as you have a piece of software that third parties extend and build upon you run into serious issues.
In the last few weeks I have received numerous approaches from people who claim to have the next big thing.
With their idea they are going to storm the web and it will soon be the hottest thing, bigger than twitter, skype, youtube etc
So what do they want from me?
I was recommended an extension for joomla this week via twitter, so naturaly I had a look. The link provided to me was to the Joomla extensions directory where I saw that the extension was both licenced under the GPL and non-commercial.
I read the description and the reviews and it sounded promising so I hopped over to the developers web site to download it for myself and have a play.
And that is when my blood started to boil (again).
