Straight Thinking

I haven’t been writing much lately since I am working heads down on an Inventory Tracking system. The system is being built using Ruby on Rails. BTW, Ruby is the greatest language I’ve been using in my career so far. I’ve been rubying for more than four years now, and I am still discovering nifty ways to express logic almost every day.

The Open Source movement combined with distributed version control and repositories such as github have a profound effect on software development. First and foremost, I am spending most of my time focusing on the specificity of the application being built, rather than Reinventing the Wheel. Many generic problems have been already analyzed and solved. An ingenious integration of the existing solution into the architecture is usually an order of magnitude more effective than a stick-built one.

As a side note, git is a terrific version control tool. Many thanks to all the developers that made it possible. A special “thank you” goes to my dear friend from college, Nicolas Pitre, who is one of the smartest people I met.

Open Source for America is a new advocacy group that recently emerged in Washington D.C. Its goal is to promote the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in the government. Prognosoft is now a proud member of the organization, working with other technology companies to make the United States government more accountable and transparent.

With more than 4 million computers (1) used by the federal government, OSS indeed has the potential to provide considerable cost savings to the taxpayer by reducing licensing costs that the government spends on proprietary software. However, a more significant benefit should be an increased transparency for government operations. In addition, we believe that OSS adoption will level the playing field for both small and large businesses, driving more innovation and creating opportunities for small businesses to work with the government.

Notes:

1. Information from a Memorandum to the heads of departments and agencies dated June 2003.