I am sitting here at LAX, our great airport in Los Angeles en-route to meet a good friend and short-time colleague, Sean Corfield; we worked at the same company for a short time, Macromedia. In any case, this is not the subject of my post here, so what is the subject?

Having spent the best part of 28 years either part-time or full-time in software application development, starting with British Leyland in England, it puzzles me that still, after all of these years, we cannot as an industry, segment, profession or whatever we are called, get the application development lifecycle right. In some ways that is good for me, because I am often brought in to fix things. Today is very different though different and that is no surprise. Sean drove the move of Macromedia from BroadVision (if I recall that name correctly) to ColdFusion and from my experience did a masterful job. Without too much gushing and with genuine reasons, I think Sean has really continually pushed to improve web application development and to lift it upward. Today, many companies worldwide are either actively moving internal applications to a web base or web-desktop base with Flex-AIR; web application development is not a passing phase nor a trivial paradigm.

What I see in many cases, where there is trouble, are inept business managers pushing for deadlines that are ludicrous; talk about "tell me the old old story!". I feel it is incumbent upon us all to rail against unreasonable expectations with reason and intelligence. It is not easy, it cost me my job in one case; I was fired and in another case I resigned on principal. Nevertheless I will never relent, in my simple way, to continually push for betterment in application lifecycle methodologies.