There are multiple paths to constructing a piece of software from start to finish.
An individual programmer can build an entire product from scratch in a couple days. A giant corporation can commission a project and delegate responsibilities to hundreds of people. An open source community can use the wisdom of the crowds to efficiently build an operating system.
Today’s episode is about another path for building software, and my own experience traveling that path. I designed and contracted an app called Adforprize that is now available on the iOS app store.
Designing an app and contracting it out to an engineer to build is a worthwhile exercise for most people in the tech industry–whether you are an engineer or not.
This post has two main arguments:
As with the previous monologue episodes such as 10 Philosophies for Engineers and You Are Not a Commodity, there are no advertisements on this episode. Please email me any feedback you have–jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Everyone has an app idea, and many of them are pretty good.
You have probably had a conversation with a friend where one of you says “hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a 2-sided marketplace for bacon?” Or “hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was an app where users could take a selfie and instantly see what celebrity they resemble the most?”
These things would be cool! But most ideas end with the ideation.
Who has the time to implement these things? Most of us are busy at
work, where we spend our time and mental energy dealing with the technical complexity of our jobs.
If you are a “smart creative”, when you get home from your job, you probably don’t want to spend your leisure hours reading iOS documentation and slowly learning to write the necessary code for your bacon marketplace app.
Smart creatives who have a busy full-time job often have a hobby with more immediate gratification, like playing an instrument or blogging. Some of us also write apps on the side, but if you don’t already have all the requisite skills for writing an app, the prospect of reading tutorials and documentation can make the feeling of ever publishing an app seem so distant.
There are many people listening to this who are
better at sales, marketing, design, or product management than they are at programming–they want to build an app. One common narrative is that if these people want to see something built, they need to learn to program, and that’s not true.
There is a more fun, fulfilling way to build an app than learning to code in Swift or React Native–contracting out the programming to someone else.
Designing an app is a fun exercise. Building a prototype with tools like Sketch, InVision, and Keynote is free and frictionless. Most people listening to this probably spent some time drawing in KidPix or Microsoft Paint or PhotoShop when they were a kid.
Most of us know how to draw at some basic level, because we spend all
day seeing and understanding images–drawing is second nature to anyone who can understand shapes. Similarly, we all know how to design apps because we spend all day using them. We understand the purpose of a button or a slider or a swipe.
But most of us have no idea how to configure the code around this user experience–the buttons and sliders and TextViews.
Along with the design process, the business ideation process is also fun. It’s fun to imagine business models and viral loops and ways to drive user engagement. But without the capability to build the app that embodies your business ideas, it is less fun to think about those ideas. And again–most of us don’t relish the idea of struggling through the compiler errors and Stack Overflow posts that an app implementation requires.
We’ve all become product designers. We are using our phones all day–most of us have naturally developed a good intuition for how an app should function.
Product design ability is naturally acquired by being steeped in technology all day. If you are an employe...
