10,000 Foot Developer

If you ride motorcycles inevitably you’ve had to find parts.  One place to buy parts via catalog is Dennis Kirk.  If you get the paper catalog you have two choices:

1. A very, very thick catalog for Harleys.  In this catalog you can find almost any repair part for Harleys dating back at least 80 years.
2. Then there’s another catalog just about the same size “for the rest” – Yamaha, Honda, BMW, Suzuki, Ducati, etc.

Argue about what motobike runs and doesn’t.  Fine.  But the cold hard fact is, in the long standing supportability of motorcycles, no one can beat Harley Davidson.  You can find parts, hard to find parts, and keep your bike running.

By the way I am not a Harley advocate; and some models like Suzuki’s KLR and the BMW GS series have great parts support.  But nowhere near, not even close, to Harley Davidson.

This metaphor can be extended to many objects.  I own the Phonic Helix mixerboard pictured above.  It’s a very excellent board, the sound is great.  It’s analog — mics and instruments in (firewire too but I do not use that anymore).  Mine is about, oh 8 years old new?  Less than 10. But the knobs have a coating that has gotten sticky and the plastic brittle.  When I contacted Phonic they told me I was SOL – don’t make the board, don’t make the knobs.  I compared newer model knobs to what I have and they could work, they look exactly like the same knobs.  But I am guessing Phonic wants me to throw the board away and buy a new one rather than make money off parts.  Other boards I can buy in the range, or of course more expensive — Mackie, Allen & Heath, Soundcraft etc. — even the lowly affordable Behringer — all make spare parts for many years.  There is not really anything that could be added to this board I would need so why buy a new one?

And phones.  Recently I was reading a Washington Post article about a new luddite class that refuses to conform to planned obsolescence in phones.  For instance the constant network upgrading.   Well, the article gets deeper touching on neo-luddism and such things we already think about and other kinds of unwanted changes, and behaviros we already use to choose new tech anyway (like not phone-surfing sites with all the popups and slow analytics causing long page loads, etc.).  But certainly planned obsolescence is a thought when buying a more powerful device.

Things can still work.  I’ve repurposed old wifi routers to gateways for a few small business some years ago; I still have a first gen Roku, still working, receive “threats” from Roku with coupons to get a new unit — for more capability.  When I upgraded my Android phone it was because I had my old phone so long it wouldn’t run any new apps due to hardware and OS restrictions — but it still called and texted.  I bought one that would take a few generations of Android upgrades, plenty of power.  My personal laptop I purchased ahead of it’s class, and I7 with a lot of RAM etc. 4-5 years ago and it’s made it to this day.  (It still is ahead of most specs for an average computer but Microsoft won’t support a Windows 8 or 10 upgrade on it and I can’t divine the reason from their install failure logs).  Windows 7 is good until 2020 anyway.

For me, the threshold for support depends on the object.  Musical equipment — like guitars and amps — last forever and hold their value and you should be able to buy parts for 50 years minimum.  Electronic?  Well, analog equipment is always in and uses universal parts, so why not at least 20 years.  Five years is ridiculous not to have spare parts, ten years too.  Especially for a company flagship model (as was this Helix model).  Computers?  Many people I know are running cheap Lenovos and Toshibas that are years old — Windows 7 or Vista, and it does what they want.  A 7-10 year life span isn’t unreasonable these days.  There are Linux distros made just to refresh old computers.  What about Macs?  The last one I had died over and over so it wasn’t worth it, but I can still get parts although at a high cost, but still get parts. Probably not for an old Apple IIe but an Apple IIe has no use that I can think of other than the novel.

Also there’s the usability need. A Mixing board is taking into environment that needs spare parts — shows, carrying around. IPhones need new screens a lot as they tend to crack, a lot.  My sister though complained her Lenovo broke — power cord, keyboard — but I noted she carried it everywhere for three years and a non-business class computer doesn’t come with the durability built into it.

What about software languages?

I often wonder who was in a room when someone picks Go as the main language for a company.   Where does this come from?  Or Clojure.   Or even these days Ruby or Groovy each with Rails.  The question, as a developer who has worked on mostly other peoples’ projects — where the thought of support, finding developers to work on the project, and forethought were considered beforehand or accepted as a cost of business.

Agree that diversity pushes the industry, and certainly choosing Java/Oracle is not the path for all software.  Also, that unforseen requirements (scalability with php, or the safety of compile time checks vs using all javascript) can come into play down the road.  Or, how often do (shudder) proof of concept projects become *actual* source code?

I would argue that most of the time your software is only as good as its support.

And just throw that out there hoping you don’t have to go looking for any knobs for your current application.  It can be costly and frustrating.