Warning
First of all, if you haven’t read Eric’s post Think Tank yet, you should read that first, as this entry is just an attempt at further explaining his idea!
The direct approach
What we as web developers do is much like the process of building a house. In theory, there would be two parties involved, a Customer and a Contractor. This is an illustration of the process:
The Customer wants a house, so he contacts a Constructor who hires handymen to build it. Put simply, it doesn’t work that way! The same holds true for developing a web application of any sort.
The man behind it all
There needs to be a third party involved in this process, and you may have already guessed who that is: the architect!
The main developer of Invision Power Board has the title CSA: “Chief Software Architect”, because that’s what we are, we’re not handymen/programmers who sit at our workstations all night long writing lines and lines of source code. There is much more to writing software, or building houses to come back to our metaphor:
In the past, Distant-Help has mainly assisted in Step 3 of the schema above. We helped finding and fixing bugs, pointing out techniques on how to do a certain task more effectively and/or with less lines of source code, …
But the only questions we ever got were “What do I need to do to get [insert programming language] to do [insert specific task]”? I don’t remember there being a thread à la “I want to develop an online calendar. What are the things I need to take care of so it is accurate everywhere in the world? What’s the deal with Daylight Savings Time? etc.”.
Conclusion
Now, I’m not saying that Step 3, the actual programming, isn’t important or that we wouldn’t help there anymore. But there is more to software development than writing source code!
And I think this is exactly the niche where Distant-Help could fit in: A place where developers can come and ask for advice on logical questions, not only technical ones. A place to ask “How do I …” questions, not only “Why isn’t this working?”.
I hope I haven’t bored you to death with this excruciatingly long blog post, and I would like some comments on it in the thread Distant-Help’s Future!
So long, Jens
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