what I find most frustrating is that finance institution buy extremely overpriced and brittle software from renowned vendors not because of technical excellence but for risk management: they want a supplier to blame when something goes wrong.
the problem with this is that nowadays suppliers are stronger in defending themselves from such blames than they are in writing good software.
furthermore, the software being sold is very pricey and the cost of customising it often exceeds the cost of the software itself.
then, 9 times out of 10 the issues lie in the customisations, and that doesn’t surprise, as the institution will be using most the custom parts as those are the ones they need most. here the vendors have even more grip in demonstrating that it’s the customer requirements’ fault, and not their crappy software, that confuses the concepts of “database” and “application server”.
I try to counter this by writing solid, robust software using open source components, giving back when possible, perfectly filling the company’s requirements, well integrated and reasonably cheap to maintain. slowly, this can help in abandoning vendors and building in-house know-how.
I find this crucial because the quality of software sold by some vendors is very very low, and getting worse.
I wrote a Ruby library[1] that builds on Active Record and implements SCD-Type 2 using updatable views and INSTEAD OF triggers.
It has its pain points, mostly related to how hackish the AR insertion is, but it works quite well and the approach ensures that any INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE triggers bookkeeping of the history tables.
the problem with this is that nowadays suppliers are stronger in defending themselves from such blames than they are in writing good software.
furthermore, the software being sold is very pricey and the cost of customising it often exceeds the cost of the software itself.
then, 9 times out of 10 the issues lie in the customisations, and that doesn’t surprise, as the institution will be using most the custom parts as those are the ones they need most. here the vendors have even more grip in demonstrating that it’s the customer requirements’ fault, and not their crappy software, that confuses the concepts of “database” and “application server”.
I try to counter this by writing solid, robust software using open source components, giving back when possible, perfectly filling the company’s requirements, well integrated and reasonably cheap to maintain. slowly, this can help in abandoning vendors and building in-house know-how.
I find this crucial because the quality of software sold by some vendors is very very low, and getting worse.