Let Joe Average Help You Code

ploose writes "Apache co-founder and CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf says that programming should be opened out to non-developers. Bring them into a development community with proper feedback forums and bad code will get flamed anyway, so it doesn't matter what they write. From the interview: 'Mashups are really Excel macros 2.0 - with the rise of Web services, the more vehicles that are out there that expose data through programmable APIs, with Office 12.0 and Firefox with AJAX, the more people you'll see create applications. The line between hardcore developers and the average Joe will start to get very fuzzy.'"

Comments

Re:Efficient?

[Fjornir]

I spent about a year doing something very similiar to this. I was one of three on the team -- the other two were very junior programmers -- and thankfully half a world away so I was never able to give into my frustration and punch them in the face. About a third of my 40 hours a week were spent on answering n00b questions and "code review". We called it a "code review" anyways -- mostly it was correcting the code and telling them to re-write it because it was wrong / hideous / whatever. From a pure coding standpoint it would have probably worked out to have taken me less time to write it all myself, but all three of us had some other non-programming responsibilities so it worked out well enough for us, I guess.