development

Report says "Search giant Yahoo has opened the source code for its e-mail service to open source developers, according to this piece. The move is an effort to encourage new e-mail-based applications, and it can't hurt the company's buzz, either. Giving customers input into the product, a Yahoo rep says here, could result in tens of thousands of Yahoo Mail-based applications. The company may be big, but it can't create every single thing its users think they might need, he says. Though the company plans to maintain the secrecy of the code behind user names and passwords, practically everything else will be accessible."

IT Product design when left in the hands of the developer tends to include everything the programmer, or the team thereof, is capable of accomplishing. As a result the product tends to have many Swiss Army knife type features, but lacks any real cutting edge, since the development time gets distributed around many small features while the main functionality does not get enough attention to be robust and mature (read fault tolerant, adaptible, portable, et cetera.) The latest technology article on HBR, Feature Bloat succintly discusses this phenomenon and its cures:

A while ago I was interacting with Julian Bond, CTO of Ecademy.com, and he emailed me a list of ideas to throw open to Software developers, who would like to build their reputation as outstanding developers by demonstrating their code rather than just a CV. Any one up for a challenge ? Julian is a highly respected developer and thinker, having single handedly developed the architecture and code of the Ecademy platform. He emailed a list of ideas for the Indian software development community to extend the now ubiquitious Skype. Skype now has over 5.5 million users and growing fast with a current campaign running to encourage users to share skype and reach out to 100 million users.

REECODE (REmodel ECOnomic DEvelopment of India)

- Over 65 per cent of India's population is in rural areas.
- All marketeers have failed/have had tough time selling to the rural mass.
- Cities are choking.
- Development is too polarised, with opportunities/wealth getting concentrated in urban areas.
- There is an urgent need to significantly improve the purchasin power of the rural population.

***** - Here, I see a business opportunity worth Rs 60,000 crore per annum, i.e. about US $ 13 Billion per annum (in sales, not just market value of IPO paper).

Power point presentation on the project as well as inital study reports in the urban and rural areas of Ujjain District of Madhya Pradesh state are available on request.

I've met a lot of good programmers who have worked a whille in various Client / Server programming environments, now wanting to make the shift to the Linux Apache MySQL PHP framework (L.A.M.P).

There's a lot of opportunity for interesting work available using the LAMP framework. This is because there are many differences in the way applications are structured when writing them to work of the Internet or a local Intranet when compared to a wired Ethernet backbone.

Several tried and tested application structures used in two tier, Client / Server, Ethernet bound frameworks will simply fail if applied exactly in the same way in the LAMP framework.