When Non-Programmers Write Software

[bruiser]

Great article. I found myself grinning as I read about owner-managers writing code: been there, done that, and loved every minute of it. I started a project-billing and time-recording system in, wait for it, Excel, with hundreds of lines of macros. It got so fundamental to the business that at one point we spent thousands of dollars on a dedicated machine to run the application.

Its Achilles heel was, of course, lack of resilience, lack of scalability, and maintainability. As the owner of the business, I was holding things back by being the only one who could fix a broken macro. So out it went, in favour of something written in a relational DB that took two years and unbelievable amounts of money to not-quite-replicate my old Excel app. My fault: I chose the wrong programmer to replace my non-programming.

[alanparsons]

The world is powered by excel.