The case of the local software developer
Tags: localsoftwaredeveloper, localsoftwaredevelopment
Published: 2022-05-14 22:19:14

So it is about local software developers.

You can consider "the local software" as the core problem, or you can see "the local developer" behind it. As Jack Sparrow said, [the problem is not the problem, the problem is your attitude about the problem](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1310655-the-problem-is-not-the-problem-the-problem-is-your).

Fortunately, these two attitudes are good enough, are relevant, and are complementary to my question to all of you.

Let's look at the example. Let's assume you are a dealer in a bank, or you are a raw IT specialist, working for the dealer. And you need to make some calculations not available at all in company IT systems, or available too late, or constantly incoming with some bugs and gaps.

If you are smart - and dealers are usually pretty smart, I know many smart dealers, some are smarter than me - you can do it by yourself.

Of course, there is usually a possibility to send a request to the local IT and order an application, but... there are many reasons why it could not be possible. The reason is unimportant.

Let's move forward to the next episode, to keep it short: we make a decision that we do it in Excel and VBA. Looks familiar? No doubt. We can even formulate a rule:

> In every non-trivial business IT ecosystem, at least one Excel spreadsheet is an important, non-easily removable part of the most critical core process.

I do not know, whether someone already formulated this rule, but I am pretty sure that I cannot be the first.

Go to the next season: we make a decision about a next application of this kind, and a next, and a next...

The applications have some parts in common, especially these parts of code with holy curtains of comments, saying nothing, or saying something incomprehensible, including declarations of a better future (TODO), with warnings about dangerous spells within (XXX and HACK).

We were there, all of us, weren't we? Maybe we forget, but our comments do not forget about us.

Less or more similar, generally these applications are milestones of our education, at least in VBA, sometimes in programming at all. So every one of these pieces is working in another manner and requires a different approach to maintenance.

Sometimes we have a bigger twist in this serial: we build the one omnibus application, which rules all of the applications.

Yeah, we know this story very, very well, at least some of us.

So my question is: can we proceed with that case in another way? A smarter way? The programmer's way?

Maybe not, because this local software developer case is often the usual software developer case. So maybe this is a bigger problem, a paradigm problem.

But maybe it is possible?

I have a general concept with many details, but now I am pretty interested in gathering opinions. I have started with a similar question at some world-known communities:

- [Atlassian](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Single-developer-s-perspective/qaq-p/1799113#U1801206)
- [GitHub](https://github.community/t/single-developers-perspective/200097)
- [GitLab](https://forum.gitlab.com/t/single-developer-s-perspective/58271)
- Reddit's [r/Develpment](https://new.reddit.com/r/Development/comments/pkxyyw/single_developers_point_of_view_how_to_work_with/) and [r/programming](https://new.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/pky0d0/single_developers_point_of_view_how_to_work_with/)
- [Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69102821/how-to-work-with-projects-issues-and-repositories-in-the-single-developers-poi)
- [Sourceforge](https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/22674/)

In brief, I have found some nice and interesting comments by programmers writing about their own professional career stories, but the feedback was rather poor. Maybe it is my fault, I have made at least one mistake, asking for opinions at Stack Overflow - do not do this at home, I earned a ban although the goal was precisely defined at the beginning.

To the shore! What do you think, is it possible to build local software in a better way? Or, at least, what is your local software developer's story?

PS It was my first post at dev.to, thank you very much for reading.