I agree! But you won't do it forever, sooner or later you realize that you've worked in something you're not passionate about. It will result in serious consequences.
More important than passion and effort is long-term goals. I believe to be successful you must project yourself in the future. Look what you will be if you continue to walk the current path or what you will be if you change your path. The key is to choose the path that will bring you to a brighter future and stay in that path in turbulent times.
Choosing the right path is not as easy as speaking but an everyday exercice.
No, it's still a developer's fault. Just because people say to do something doesn't mean to do it. Likewise, many other parties preach something different.
Building out a full app then testing out a hypothesis was probably a waste of time. Putting up a landing page and promoting out to his network would likely have yielded very similar results - people saying "we don't need another todo list". faster, and cheaper.
Any toolkit that attempts to shoehorn a consistent experience on the web is doomed to failure. People have made efforts, earnest efforts, at solving the problem (dojo, ext, closure, capuccino). None have caught on and at the moment I'm assuming none will.
Bakground paragraph: I've been thinking about the issue since 2004 or so and always assumed that a widget toolkit would develop like it did for desktop environemnts and one or two would eventually win. The launch of mobile app development changed things. The kinds of apps being delivered were outright better than what equivalent web apps were delivering. Not the perf, I assume perf is going to be solved by better hardware and engine improvements, but what the apps accomplish. My conclusion is that every project has a semi-fixed budget of resources and that web developers burn roughly 50% of that budget on building a custom one-off interface solution for every project they work on. The obvious answer is components but component frameworks had not been catching on so the question is why.
The normally cited problem is the composition problem. It's incredibly difficult to achieve component isolation in the DOM and the Web Components effort is attempting to address. I approve the effort but I do not believe it will solve the problem. It's possible(ref yui3) to write components that will cleanly drop into pages that keep their CSS tweaks class based and that restriction isn't unreasonable in an app. Component use happens more frequently in apps but is not the default like it needs to be to escape the one-off tar pit. The issue is social.
The web's roots in documents mean that pretty much everybody wants a custom UI. All existing component libraries, following desktop toolit precedents, come as a packaged markup/CSS/behavior combo. These two requirements are opposed and that opposition is the core problem. I have never used a component library and not had to customize a signfiicant number of components. When doing so, I either have to maintain a private fork of the component or suffer in download/perf as the framework is super heavy and caters to all possibilities. The yui3 (and looks like current dojo) approach of core+plugin composition with auto dependency resolution is the best solution I know of but overriding is still non-trivial. Tweaking the CSS usually means having to build a complete theme and using generated markup is hit and miss.
My current thinking is that Web Components are a start but there needs to be a good solution for selectively overriding a part of the markup and for overriding style. CSS preprocessor features are also required to achieve styling goals efficiently. The rise of Bootstrap might prove me wrong by starting as an incomplete system, getting buy in (multiple themes, adoption for simple uses), and growing to a more complete one but we'll see.
Yeah and we'll probably only have to wait another 5 years!
It's funny how .NET languages can have a consistent, predictable and precision framework built up around them and yet somehow we're supposed to believe that JS is better than bytecode.
If you look for achievement in programming field you have to plan it for a long term in specific area. Unfortunately many programmers turn to be jack of all trades, working in many things at the same time and without a long term purpose.
I'm also in the process of quitting my job. What I wanted is product development so I decided to focus more on enterpreneurship instead of IT consultancy and data maintainance.
So far I learned a lot. More in months than years of IT consultancy. Enterpreneurship is exciting but it is very hard. Its like a rollercoaster.
Right now I'm working on quopox.com. It has been a very rewarding experience. I'm also 32 but I don't have much financial burden so it's now or never.
Good luck on your endeavor. I wish you all the best!
98% of Portuguese IT industry are consultancy and solution development. We have very few product and services development. The game industry is almost zero, applications made here are very rare and services are just copycats. We have a lot of public institutions IT back office projects executed by the same big companies. For a programmer who loves programming: what is the motivation in doing back-offices?
Well there are some efforts in entrepreneurship but most of "startup" ideas falls into the same bin like social networks for cakes or events, project tracking systems or business cards mobile apps. There is much buzz around the startup concept and the idea of having your own business but not on ideas for products that offer real value to people.
In an environment like this it is difficult for a programmer to evolve
That's so right. One classic "success" story of the Portuguese web is http://www.adegga.com/, a social network for wine... :(
Other classic success stories are the ubiquitous service-consultancy firms, always recruiting developers for Sharepoint, COBOL, SAP... Every year I hear about some 3 new of these successful firms.
You can also see so called "startups" whose "business" consists of organizing dinners of 20 people, once a week. And there's always the team wanting to open a spa and bringing their "idea" to all incubators.
My solution was to work in close relationship to the university and a university spun-off company. Some interesting computer-vision stuff is made here, from time to time.
I never used it, so I cannot comment on the technological nature of Adegga, but I imagine it's as technological as any other social network.
Outsystems seems to be pretty successful, yeah. But it's a software development platform, in which you drag an "if" block from a palette and drop it in a canvas. Most people prefer typing "if".
I could not agree more! This, among other things, is one of the things that puzzles me the most: almost no products. To that I'll add lack of capability to scale.
I've worked at a startup here once, and have seen this lack of capability to scale happen in first hand: unfortunatelly, at the time I was to focused on just being the 'technical guy', and did not have any real input to give (mind you I was just an employee - there is no concept of equity shares to employees in Portugal, thus no economical incentive in this regard).
Now that I have the will to actually be a part of a startup, I'm 'too old', have a family, and honestly, don't know where to look.
We are never old to do what we like. We just need to find the right environment. This environment exists but, of course, we must do something in order to find it. Going to conferences, meet the right people and address the issues of portuguese entrepreneuship. Without effort and some positive criticism we won't be able to change the panorama.
Although the scaling issues is due, in some part, to lack of investment (in other words green dollars) we could address it if professionals were willing to work on ideas they don't own. And many are. People are not motivated only by money but also by achievement.
Unfortunately we are transmitting that to do entrepreneuship you need your own idea and not joining someone and improve his idea, helping him to scale and turn it in our idea (and not only his idea). This may be the reason why there are so many ideas which are derivates of what exists is in the market.
I agree with the difficulty to obtain investment. The ones with the money are the big banks, that still prefer very conservative (patent based!) bussiness, and there isn't much else.
Not so long ago, the dream of a student finishing college here would be an internship on any given big company, even if not paid (and hence, supported by its parents, 95% of the cases), in hopes of then getting a paid job in the same company.
It's incredible how this seemed excelent, but spending the same amount of 'parent money' in trying a startup of your own (or someone else's, I agree with your point) seemed utterly irresponsible.
A 'directory of IT portuguese startups' would be an excelent point to start: perhaps someone already has a cool idea that you not mind working on. Right now I find this kind of information to be really scattered. I've thought of doing this myself, perhaps I should return to this idea.
I've been at the first TechMeetupsLX meeting, it was interessting if not a bit long - seems this was sorted out in the next ones. I hadn't the chance to return, but hope to do it soon enough. Any other suggestions? I fear that the some of the paid conferences are still dominated by the 'big sharks', and no real opportunities are there... is this just an illusion on my part?
So why not open up shop yourself? There will be even a 'better' time when the EU tanks, but now is a great time to get great people and make new companies. You don't like the way it is now, so, why not start something to do cool stuff. Make original games and apps? Do 50% client jobs (but only in your niche), do 50% your own. Few friends, small office and have fun.
