Ryan McKern

Matt Ball has posted a siz­able write-up which neatly sums up the ris­ing tide of back­lash against the so-called "Deli­cious Gen­er­a­tion" of soft­ware devel­op­ers cur­rently bilk­ing milk­ing aban­don­ing their installed base every 6-to-8 months.

I had been work­ing on some­thing sim­i­lar, though admit­tedly much, much less details when this dropped. My inter­est in this was strictly per­sonal, as I've been bit­ten by Austin Moth­er­fuck­ing Sarner twice now: I am a recov­er­ing license holder for Cat­a­log and Disco.

Oh sure, when these apps were launch­ing there was fan­fare and ban­ners and near-daily blog updates about the sta­tus of them… and the promises! Oh, the promises that were made to get my small amount of hard earned money. But where are the updates, bug fixes, or new ver­sions of these sim­ple apps? If they're aban­doned, is there any notice that they're now orphans?

What really kills me about all of this is that there is a bounty of Mac devel­op­ers who are pro­duc­ing amaz­ingly well designed appli­ca­tions (that don't shit all over the human inter­face guide­lines) at an astound­ing pace. Every­thing Panic puts out is qual­ity, Text­Mate rocks my face off, and CSSEdit is still the best style-sheet tool in OS X for the bil­lionth year in a row.

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Vent­ing aside, I know that this gen­er­a­tion specif­i­cally can pro­duce tal­ented, focused, cre­ative soft­ware devel­op­ers who are inter­ested in writ­ing good soft­ware, not in offer­ing engi­neer­ing ser­vices with­out actu­ally being a trained engineer*.

SKEdit is a won­der­fully usable prod­uct, with reg­u­lar updates, and a car­ing devel­oper, and Sean Kelly is in the same age bracket as Austin and Phil Ryu; but no one ever lumps him in with them. Is it his lack of shame­less self pro­mo­tion (MacHeist, Disco, AppZap­per, etc)?

Is it his abil­ity to stick to a sin­gle project, and see it through to com­ple­tion, or his tal­ent for actu­ally lis­ten­ing to what his cus­tomers want in the next ver­sion of SKEdit? Is he excluded for not spend­ing his time on a flashy seizure induc­ing web­site or com­pli­cated mar­ket­ing cam­paign? Maybe it's just because he's not a com­plete bag of douche like Phil Ryu is prov­ing him­self to be?

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Oh, how I long to hear the rebut­tals that the Douchebag Gen­er­a­tion devel­op­ers are going to wall­pa­per their blog-o-trons with. I sus­pect that when they are finally writ­ten, they too will have fancy shmancy cus­tom designs, high­light­ing the sub­tle con­trast between the babyshit green and pock-marked "too much Indian food" black in their end­lessly spew­ing rivers of bullshit.

*As of this evening, Austin Sarner's self-named site offers "human inter­face design and engi­neer­ing". As the friend of a num­ber of real engi­neers (mechan­i­cal, elec­tri­cal, com­puter, etc), I take umbrage on their behalf as "engi­neer" is a term that denotes seri­ous and­stren­u­ous train­ing, study, and at least a mod­icum of test­ing before one earns the right to slap it willy-nilly on their resume.

Engi­neers build things that peo­ple depend on, not fluff peo­ple dis­card 4 months later.