Pervasive Code

With all of the zillions of companies building “widgets” for MySpace, Bebo, etc., it’s only a matter of time before the gray-hat crowd starts to see the dollar signs. Maybe they already have. But it seems like a large waste of effort for all of those strange little VC-funded startups playing remora to MySpace’s shark to have to keep figuring out new ways to get their code to embed in MySpace layouts.
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Related to Rapid Application Development vs. Big Design Up Front is the question of what exact format the UI design work should be done in.

This is more important than user stories vs. use cases, class diagrams vs. ERDs and other such decisions, because UI design artifacts are the most user-accessible artifacts. That means they’re probably the only ones you’re actually going to be able to get users to look at. Try emailing a CFO a 100-page Word doc full of use cases sometime, if you don’t believe me. Then sit that same CFO down in front of Excel and ask for a rundown of their least favorite Excel features. Big difference!
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To: pontin@nytimes.com

Regarding your article “Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software”:

Your ignorance of the reality of software development would be excusable if not for the fact that your CV suggests that you should know better. Your defamatory description of programmers smears an entire industry of individuals with a single, pejorative stereotype.
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I’m working on a new project which I regard as medium-large in scope, and I’ve decided to use BDUF instead of RAD on it. This is of course heresy in light of the effect XP and Ruby on Rails have had on the web startup zeitgeist. (“Isn’t it all about RAD these days?”) But I still think I’m making the right call here.
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Joel Spolsky does a good job of describing why “there is no silver bullet” is true.