Are Single-Programmer Software Projects Doomed?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 13, 2014 at 06:36 AM

Garland, I’d be most interested in learning what your first choice for project management software was. In another post you mentioned Teamwork which I assume was your second. My own team’s choice was similarly determined by the need to do just that: collaborate. Moving from a personal solution to a collaborative one means usually opting for a new product—the completely different interfaces of Todoist and Wedoist are indicative.

In respect to lone programmers’ projects, I believe that they are anything but doomed. However, that doesn’t mean that they will flourish in the same way they did before the days of ubiquitous mobile connectivity, web-based tools etc. In fact, the new market makes it easy for a developer to focus on their software alone, with everything else being taken care of within specific frameworks, i.e. licensing, trial/activation, payments etc. The wealth of independent software available for Android and iOS devices is indicative. If each of those developers had to build their own eshop and take care of selling their software, there would be far less offerings.

Similarly, developers now have many platforms on which they can rely on to expand their products’ abilities; from Simplenote for syncing to the whole Google Apps infrastructure. Take a look at GQueues for example; it seems to be a single programmer’s work, yet he offers integration with Google Mail, Calendar etc. thanks to the APIs available.

At the same time, this kind of mainstreaming leads to much less differentiation of products, starting with the hardware itself: within the unending variations of Android phones available, it is remarkably hard to find one with a physical keyboard. Similarly, the vast majority of software titles coming out nowadays are often very difficult to tell apart.

In brief, I don’t worry much about the programmers having success with their independent projects. However, I very much doubt the future availability of truly innovative and deeply thought-out tools that would fit the needs of more demanding customers like the esteemed participants of this here forum.