One of the coolest videos I have seen recently has been the trailer for Fog Creek Software’s new training series titled “Make Better Software”.
If you did not know (or you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years), Fog Creek Software is Joel Spolsky’s company. Fog Creek is probably most famous for its FogBugz product. Joel, an ex-Microsoftie, is famous for a bunch of things, most notably his blog, books, and talks.
Why you need Make Better Software
Once released (you can pre-order it now), I think the video series will be a hit among folks trying to establish a healthy software development environment where developers are empowered to make great software that in turn provides users with a great experience. This sounds like a mouthful, but as sad as it might sound, there are not too many companies out there that can go beyond making software to actually make great software. The common excuse is that there is not enough time… “We must release soon, otherwise we will lose our customers or market to competition… We cannot afford writing unit tests, after all that’s why we have QA…” For those particular folks I think this training series will be of the most help.
What is great software?
What is great software? To me, great software not only solves a specific problem, but actually goes beyond that to allow you to be the most productive and the best you can be while solving that specific problem. This, in fact, has been the mission statement for Microsoft for so many years, and it has been presented/stated in so many different forms. For example, Visual Studio embodies that by providing developers with the tools that allow them to be the best they can be at writing great software (and thus being great themselves). This might sound like a sales pitch for Visual Studio, but the fact is that throughout the years, Visual Studio has evolved from a set of tools to a single development environment that is the core of Windows-based development.
It is great to see Joel come up with yet another cool idea for the developer community. It’s true that there are so many software development training videos in the market, but I truly believe that this one goes beyond the commercial aspect. After all, you can probably get most of this figured out if you’ve been following Joel’s blog and writings…