Steve Workman's Blog

Developers need inspiration to survive

Posted on by Steve Workman About 2 min reading time

It's been quite a few months since I've been really inspired to do something. The last time I was truly inspired was after watching The Social Network: the film about the origins of Facebook. It's a tale about a man and some friends who was driven to create a service that everyone on campus, and eventually the world, would use.

It's inspiring because it's played out by an anti-hero (Zuckerberg) whose determination and talent brought about the result. It isn't really about angel investors or girls, it's about hard work to create a great product, burning the candle at both ends and willing to put your everything into a cause.

I saw another example of this this weekend, from the unlikely source of the musical Legally Blonde. It's another hero story, but this time our heroine is attending Harvard Law school for completely the wrong reason. She finds that when she puts in years of hard work, she finds something far better than that thing she went for (and love).

What struck me is how driven people are when they're inspired. It's a rare project for me that inspires, that really makes me think I'm making a difference, but when those projects do come around the atmosphere in the team is completely different; people want to work their evenings and weekends because they are having fun, enjoying their work, and actually want to do it.

A product that people want to work on and enjoy doing will simply be of higher quality (and sometimes completed faster) because the product matters to that developer. They are driven, compelled, inspired.

Without inspiration, a developer's soul withers and dies. I'm a firm believer that all almost all people want to do good, whether that's through charity work or writing financial software that allows those grants to be given.
so pick one.

Pick the right tool I've discovered the hard way that not all grids are made equal. Here's a list of features and grids that we tried (in chronological order)