We open-source developers have a well-deserved reputation for being passionate about software. It’s not just a job for us — solving problems and streamlining the solutions to be elegant and intuitive is as much of a calling for us as curing a disease might be for a doctor, or composing a symphony for a musician.
So it would make sense to assume that as a business, technology would be our number one priority. You’d be assuming wrong, though. We love technology, but the goal of our technology work is always to serve the needs of business. Business is the starting and ending point of each and every one of our projects. For us, creating our programs without the client’s business needs in mind would be like cooking food that nobody’s going to eat — maybe interesting as a learning experience, but unsatisfying and wasteful.
For instance, on our own time we read software blogs and think “wow, that new platform looks really cool, I can’t wait for a chance to play with it.” But when we’re working for a client, we think, “what does this project really need?” The client’s need matters more than what we think is the most interesting or sophisticated technology for the job. The end result? Elegant, cleanly integrated systems that don’t waste space and effort competing to be noticed.
Coming from a software background, we believe that business can offer many of the same challenges as programming — lots of different parts have to work together, and the hardest part is always finding a simple resolution that makes it all look easy. Our project management training has honed our abilities to understand the needs of a business as a whole — to look at the organization itself, not just a buggy email system or an outdated platform.
That’s why we don’t have a problem sometimes putting aside the chance to geek out over technology in favor of doing what’s best for business: because deep down, problem solving is problem solving, and architecture is architecture, whether you’re drawing up blueprints for a web-based application system, or for a company’s project flow.