Today I am going to complain a bit without offering a solution. You have been warned.
As you might know I am working on my upcoming web application called quantify. Here is the think. I am probably building one of the simplest application on earth. When you hear simple you might be thinking. That is easy to do. Right? Actually not. Here comes the list of skills you need to have to be able to build the simplest application.
- you need to be able to design the app first in software like Photoshop, Illustrator or Gimp
- you need to be able to register and setup the domain name for it
- you need to be able to set you web server, in the worst case (mine case) you need to be able to install the whole server almost from scratch
- you need to be able to setup you working environment, things like accessing remotely your server with ssh etc
- you need to be able to setup your deployment, tools like Capistrano could help a lot
- you need to know bash commands
- you need to be able to setup backup for your code, server database data
- you need to be able to setup repository for your code using services like GitHub
- you need to be able to use Text Editor
- you need to be able to produce HTML code
- you need to be able to produce CSS code
- you need to be able use one of the existing Javascript libraries like jQuery
- you need to be able to build the back-end of the application in languages like Ruby on Rails, PHP, ASP
- you need to be able to write tests to check the quality of your code
- you need to be able to setup payment gateways so you can charge for your app
- you need to be able to setup SSH so your app uses secure connection
Did I forget anything? Probably yes.
Once you done with the application you need to be able to marketize the product, provide customer service, handle the payments correctly.
So the question is. Is this really the future of web apps? I guess it will be even more complicated and it will require even more knowledge.
What do you think?