Re: Philadelphia pays $353,710 for website

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Adam Fields <ip20398470293845 () aquick org>
Date: January 19, 2009 6:45:01 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Philadelphia pays $353,710 for website

For IP, if you wish:

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 04:05:35PM -0500, David Farber wrote:
[...]
> "It sounds like something one programmer could throw together in a
> week or two, that's my intuition," Sleator said. For $20,000, he said,
> "you can buy a server computer that will handle millions of requests"
> for the data.
[...]

It's impossible to say anything definitive about this without a lot
more information, but ever since I've been building web applications
professionally, "my nephew could throw this together in a weekend" has
been a very common refrain.

Speaking as an actual professional web application architect who spent
many years training to do what I do, I have found that this statement
is never true.

Maybe the city got ripped off. Maybe the project was badly mismanaged
on one side or another. Maybe the requirements kept changing. Maybe
maybe maybe - there are a lot of ways that web development projects
can go wrong.

One thing I can say definitively is that people who aren't involved in
these kinds of projects almost never understand the true complexity in
building custom software, and almost always underestimate the time and
cost to do it right.

There are other factors, but in their defense, it sounds like they did
a fine job - the product launched on time and stood up under a high
traffic load.

--
                                - Adam

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