The Worst Strategic Mistake You Can Make
Over 20 years ago, future ex-Stack Overflow CEO and Trello creator Joel Spolsky wrote an enduring blog post on “the worst strategic mistake” developers and enterprises can make: writing code from scratch.
He says, in part:
“You are throwing away your market leadership [when you start from scratch]. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.
“You are putting yourself in an extremely dangerous position where you will be shipping an old version of the code for several years, completely unable to make any strategic changes or react to new features that the market demands, because you don’t have shippable code. You might as well just close for business for the duration.
“You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.”
Different decade, same problems
I first read Spolsky’s blog as a middle-schooler when it was being passed around on tech ProBoards in the early 2000s. I only recently revisited it when someone reshared it on HackerNews.
I was struck by how closely it aligned with Onymos Founder and CEO Shiva Nathan’s perspective on the state of software development today.
Shiva has always said that “the inefficiencies of app development” he encountered as Intuit’s Head of Platforms and Services are what inspired him to found Onymos — but what are those inefficiencies?
In a 2020 interview, he explained, “To begin with, everyone reinvents the wheel every time. This is absurd. Software engineers are writing brand new code to build a function or writing code to integrate ‘offerings’ by other developers or services or companies.”
In other words, he felt like Intuit (and, for that matter, everyone else) was “wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.”
The strategic solution
“DRY” is a popular acronym that stands for “Don’t Repeat Yourself,” as in don’t write the same code more than once. It’s a strategy that the industry as a whole, after decades, still hasn’t quite got the hang of.
But thanks to Onymos Features-as-a-Service, our enterprise customers are finally applying DRY at scale. If writing code that already exists is a strategic mistake, then getting that code off the shelf instead is the strategic solution.
CloudWave CEO Prabhakar Ramakrishnan, whose company provides software development services for government agencies, used Onymos to get their latest document processing product to market faster.
“It would have been a lot more complex if we had done it from scratch or used another third-party system. We would have spent a lot more time on research and development and architecture,” said Ramakrishnan, estimating that it would have taken about 10 times longer to develop the functionality they needed in-house.
If you’re a tech leader who wants to transform your team (or your company) and build products and services faster, get in touch. We know we can help.