13 Sep 2002 CaptainNemo   » (Journeyer)

janschrage: Sorry, I didn't finish my thought... What I meant to say was ``PostNuke needs PostNuke users, and ProjectX needs ProjectX users''. When users start being a liability, is when they veer from the vision and start pushing separate directions. The Envolution/Encompass people were valuable users, they were just users of the wrong project, since their vision didn't coincide with that of PostNuke.

If I was writing a CMS to manage my personal site, the only user I'd care about is the only user that's going to be using it, Me. But since ProjectX has a far wider audience then just the developers, care needs to be taken to see to it that the users needs are being met. If ProjectX doesn't need users then what's the point in writing a program for a larger audience. Of course, like I said in my previous post, the needs of the users come after the needs of the developers, or else you'll find yourself in a situation where the users bite the hand that feeds it.

Even if you're only writing a program for your personal use, and you don't care about anything but your own needs, finding another person who has the same needs as you and starts using your code would be a huge benefit. Now you have 2 pairs of eyes on your code and any bugs will surface twice as fast. Even if your user never contributes anything but bug-reports, he may recommend your software to another user who becomes a developer, or forks off and creates a whole new beast out of your code (which is a good thing).

So I guess to sum it all up, my thoughts are: if you're writing a program for an audience greater then the developers you need users. If not, then users are an asset. Either way, users are a good thing :)

And, I do get a kick out of knowing that my code is being used by someone other then myself, it wouldn't be enough to keep me working on a project though.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!