Do the Damned Thing!

A great friend of mine, Chuck Beattie, once said something that has since stuck with me, "Just do the damned thing!" At the time he was working with me as a software developer and trying with immense patience to teach me to play guitar. I can't even remember the context but I certainly remember the message and it applies to so many situations.

I've been talking to several entrepreneurs lately and one thing I've noticed that hinders more than a few of them is getting stuck in the big picture planning and failing to perfect the core product.  There is no need to hire a team, build out infrastructure or look for investors until you have a handle on what it is you're actually building.

I've been guilty of the same thing over the years; planning a software project of such scope with so many moving parts that it took an immense effort, not only to code, but to debug and launch the product. A grand vision is fine, but one must learn to break it down into component parts.

I'm sure most of us have thought of a really great idea for a product, book, article, application, system of government, rocket fuel, inter-dimensional portal...etc. Sometimes we might see our idea years later in production made by someone who had the same idea and did something about it.

A couple of friends of mine, Shane Remington and Kendall Weaver, know how to take that next step and what they created with Peppermint OS benefits a huge number of people. These guys work other jobs, have families and social lives. They aren't the stereotypical hide in a cave socially awkward entrepreneurs. They just did the damn thing!

Imagine it like this, what if Da Vinci had spent all of his time talking about and building a frame for the Mona Lisa?

Knight of the Old Code and the New database

I realized today that I'm supporting code from over 6 years ago and I was fairly astonished that it still gets the job done as well as it did then. I love pushing the envelope and writing code that utilizes the latest and greatest tools, libraries and dark voodoo magic, as I would imagine all coders do, but it turns out that it's not always necessary.

There comes a point when old code just isn't good enough anymore, but I'm finding that point to be very subjective. Naturally I would like to write new code all the time to replace the code I've written in the past. I would love to replace all the legacy web applications with shiny new silverlight applications sporting sexy user interfaces and the latest and greatest data connections, but in business, it's not always practical to spend so much time. The ROI just isn't there in most cases.

That being said, I feel that it's crucial to update the database behind the code and make sure that all the data connections are secure. Many data breaches are the result of under secured web applications that practically give away data. It's easy in an Enterprise to overlook that old application that three people still use somewhere in Asia. Three people who never complain or otherwise bring attention to themselves or the application. The application, in many cases, might access a server that accesses another server...etc. In this way an obscure application might play gatekeeper to an entire, otherwise secure, network.

It's fairly simple to track down in code where an application talks to the database and even though it can be a considerable task to upgrade a database and change all the connections in an application, it is much harder to explain to a client why their data is hanging out on a torrent site.