Skip to main content

Know your hammer from your screwdriver: The right tool for the job

As software developers, we at Naked Element, are skilled and experienced in a number of different programming languages and aware of many, many more. Choosing the right programming language for a piece of software is as important as choosing a hammer to knock in a nail, a flat headed screw driver for a flat headed screw and a cross headed screwdriver for cross headed screw. However with software it’s far more complicated as there isn’t always just one tool for the job.

It’s also important to consider the skills you have at hand. For example, you wouldn’t usually ask a plumber to fix your electrics or an electrician to fix your plumbing. However, given enough time most plumbers could learn to do electrics and vice versa. Generally people with a talent for practical things can easily pick up other practical skills. It’s the same with software developers, but you have to consider whether the investment in new skills will return sufficient results in an acceptable time frame, or whether to risk compromising your margins by bringing in already experienced outside help. It’s not an easy decision!

Software developers (the good ones at least) love learning new things - programming languages in particular - but there are divisions of course. Some software developers are only interested in writing software for Microsoft Windows, for example, or for Open Source platforms such as Linux and the tools they use are quite different. It’s even more pronounced with Android developers and iPhone developers! You don’t often get developers who like a bit of everything, but it does happen, and those are the sorts of developers we have at Naked Element.

It’s true that we’d happily write Java (a general purpose programming language aimed at open source software development) all day long, but that wouldn’t allow us to develop complete pieces of software. We regularly use various combinations of Java, Ruby on Rails and JavaScript in order to get the best result. We’ve turned our hand to Python and, more recently, Microsoft core languages such as C# and VB.net too. It depends what our clients need and our assessment of the right tool for the job. Sometimes it’s not even about choosing a programming language. Sometimes it’s about choosing pre-built software, such as Wordpress, and customising it to our client’s needs. We wouldn’t use Wordpress for anything more complicated than a simple e-commerce system, but for websites, including ours, it’s the right tool for the job.

So when you’re choosing your software development partner, consider whether they’re using the right tools for your project or whether they’re just using the hammer they’re familiar with to knock in your screw.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv

Bloodstock 2009

This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th