Wasting Less Time

As you’ve might have noticed from our announcement on the thoughtbot home page we’ve recently made the decision that we will be standardizing on 2 development languages going forward.

In this post I think I’ll focus more on the business angle of this decision.

We felt strongly, after coming to the conclusion time and time again, that we were simply wasting time programming web applications in perl and php (see my previous post regarding MVC). That’s not in the best interest of our customers, and not in the best interest of our bottom line. Java (and EJB and Struts) and Ruby On Rails provide us with the framework to waste less time.

Ok, now for the big picture… it is absolutely critical – in fact, its part of our business model, to find ways to waste less time. By using and/or developing reusable components, frameworks, etc. it becomes possible to deliver better applications to our customers for less time and money. This principal needs to be applied to each level of the organization – beyond coding – to payroll, invoicing, mundane paperwork, and so on.