TVOM: Time Value of Money

TVOM is the elephant in the living room of software development.

Tool vendors create Value expressed as Time, and then comes their own tradeoff - a sucking sound that is supposed to be music to the developer's ears. If only that tradeoff was really music.

Grails gets selected for our 2008 project !

Funny thing that Grails went from being the red-headed step child to favored son here at work, in a very short couple of months.

Came about because we had a few days to do R&D in November, and with that little amount of time I couldn't risk a failed project. So I wrote a quickie persistence app for our Flex prototype in Grails, even though I had never done a Grails project in my life.

Maven Sucks.

You might think that was a silly thing for a Maven evangelist to say, but compare me to any other evangelist and it's easy to see the similarities. If I was an evangelist for the Foo Religion I would be saying things like "sure it's a challenge to be a Fooist but the benefits are Footernity" or something like that. I wouldn't be saying it had no cost. It sucks to be a Fooist, people throw darts at me and all kinds of nasty things happen.

As a developer, how much time do I spend adding value, and how much time maintaining infrastructure ?

Sometimes my estimate goes like this

• Adding Value: 20% of my time
• Maintaining Infrastructure 80% of my time

Really I have no idea, but sometimes it seems like it really is lopsided.