On the Bangalore OCC mailing list which has a fantastic mix of entrepreneurs, consultants, VCs and like, somebody while advising to be careful while hiring web developers commented: “Web development is not… one time development…”. That got me thinking: Web development is still tricky. Yes, we do have our productive frameworks and tried agile methodologies, but there is still something which makes developing a web application inherently hard.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. — Winston Churchill

Recently, an article bubbled up in delicious popular that caught my eye: Why I Don’t Mind Maintenance Programming

As the author notes, almost every developer wants to work on a new project. So much so that, it is invariably brought up in job interviews either by companies to sell their position or by candidates trying to decide whether to take up an offer. I was no different when I graduated from college and was duly disappointed when couple of months into my first job I realized I would be doing maintenance of several legacy systems. Only later did I realize the whole lot of good that it did to me:

My wife once told me about her first lecture in Computer Science back in her college days. The teacher walked in and started talking about history of computers, data, files, computer languages and “lots of other hyperbole”. She didn’t understand anything out of the one hour lecture. Soon after that, she switched to Political Science.

I have heard similar stories of people getting a rough introduction to computers. That got me thinking about how I got introduced to computers. I remember in my very first class (I was 12 then), my teacher Mr. Jhulan Chakraborty started by explaining what a computer is. What he said, stayed with me ever since: