I'm hosting on Microsoft Azure, so Application Insights gives me most of the server monitoring, but you make a good point about checking 3rd party services that I have dependencies on and tracking license expiration dates, which I have no process for at the moment. I'll check in to that.
That post makes really interesting reading. I'm hosting on Microsoft Azure, so I'm hoping they have a lot of that stuff covered, but I guess I need to dive in and make sure.
Depending on the nature of the application, you may be able to sign up for Microsoft's BizSpark program. That includes $160 of credit for Azure per month for three years. That would be more than enough to host your application on either an Azure website or Azure Cloud Service.
I've been running applications on Azure Web Sites and Cloud Services for several years now and have found it to be much more reliable and better performng than the cheap shared hosting option I'd been using previously.
I like this idea in principle but I struggle with the idea of charging someone to use an experiment. My personal feeling is that once you take someone's money you have an obligation but, until you hit some level of scale, you may not be able to commit the time and effort to meet that obligation. With creative endeavours there is really a once-off transaction whereas for a SAAS application the customer expects an ongoing service.
My concern is that whilst they think they are doing their job, the people paying them don't think they are doing it well enough or doing enough of it to value it. I'm seeing more and more development jobs off-shored or out-sourced not because that results in better work, but simply because it results in the same work being done more cheaply. That's great for the companies and countries that are picking up that work, but it's leaving a swathe of developers who are "mid-career" who are at risk of becoming unemployed and whilst they may get new jobs, they may not earn the kind of money they are used to.
I honestly think this will continue. I've seen startups, and Fortune 5, Fortune 500 doing this. I believe a majority of the development function will continue to be outsourced. I read CIO magazine regularly, and I see the development process continue to be outsourced. In addition, India, Russia, China, Thailand are becoming good development alternatives. The first round of outsourcing in the early 00's didn't go so well. However, the economics of the situation, and the increasing skill set lead me to believe it will continue. I am sure this comment will be flamed, but it's the truth IMHO. (Note: I have a CompSci degree, done a few tech startups as CTO, so don't shoot the messenger).
I agree, curiosity and passion are something you either have or you don't. As an industry we need to improve our capabilities and continuously demonstrate our value and a subset who are lacking or have outdated skills risks influencing the perception of the value of the whole.
That said, if we can't make people want to be interested we need to find another way to reach them.
Some industries require formal certification and demonstration of ongoing professional development, but IT generally doesn't (although there are pockets which do). Some of the best developers I have worked with have had no formal training, however, just passion, curiosity and a willingness to put in the hours to learn and excluding them would be a mistake. So how do we do it?
I totally agree with you - for many programmers, programming is just a job. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but I work with a lot of these developers and my issue / concern is that they are not actually very good at their job - they get by only because expectations of IT in their organisations are low, something which is true in most large corporations and many smaller ones.
When the people paying the IT bills have low expectations to begin with, and are often disappointed with the applications they are given, IT becomes devalued.
I'm working with a team at the moment where we have introduced a structured data access architecture (.NET shop, so Entity Framework underpinning a repository model) and it has transformed the productivity of the team. They are no longer writing the same data access code in 5 different places, testing it 5 times and finding 5 different sets of bugs. They are now writing the code once, testing it once and re-using it.
The team hadn't even heard of Entity Framework, despite being a dedicated Microsoft/.NET shop and Entity Framework being around for several years. Getting them to move from their hand-coded approach, which was what they learnt for .NET 1.0 was a challenge but, having done it, they wouldn't go back and love the flexibility and power the new approach gives them.
This isn't a discussion about technologies though. I'm sure that there are many other teams just like this team and I'm interested in how to get to them to introduce new technologies and ways of working. The more productive we are as developers, and the more "delight" the applications we develop are, the more valued we will all be as an industry.
