Thanks for the feedback on the first part of 'How I build an application' that I published two days ago.

The day after writing that post, I had a meeting with a client and I am starting an addon to an existing application for them. During the meeting, which lasted about 2 and 1/2 hours, I thought about what I had written the previous night. Here I was spending time laying out details of a business process with a client, discussing pro's and con's, when I had just written that I mostly guess at this stuff!

Well, I figured I should come clean. It took me another 48 hours to figure out that I really was still guessing. The meeting really came down to discussing the business process, or The Vision rather then the actual implementation of the project. In fact, because I know this client pretty well after working with them for over 2 years, they don't really care about the implementation.

I like to think that part of being good at what I do is understanding that the client cares about the vision, and as long as I deliver the vision, I'll continue to work with them. This is a key point because most software programmers don't take the time to understand how critical the vision is. This is complicated by the fact that the customer often doesn't know what they want. Enough about that, here's the classic comic that illustrates this point. Click for the large version.

The point is that whether you are envisioning a bird house sized project, like the Recipe software I talked about in part 1, or a large software addon, the process is essentially the same. The difference lies in the complexity of the vision.


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