FOWYDB - almost looks like a "bad word", doesn't it? Well, it is something we have been telling ourselves the last couple of days. Focusing on what WE do best. The Worx Company started out as an .asp shop, and when it merged with Meridian Data, well, not much changed. For several years, we stuck with our .asp content management system.
About three years ago, our President, Kurt Vanderwater, decided that we needed an open source content management system. He has always been a huge advocate for open source products, and found Drupal after some research. That's how we got into Drupal - one man's vision to change how we do business.
Three years later, we are still fighting upstream. We have many clients with .asp websites who still host with us. Every day we get e-mails from clients who need us to change a sentence, an event date, a pdf catalog on their website. We have been slowly contacting them to change over to Drupal, because soon, we will no longer support .asp. Period. It's a difficult fight.
Our convictions are tried quite a bit when a BIG client wants to add features to their old site. "We have a perfectly good website, we just want more features on it. So no, we don't want a whole new system." You know, one of those clients that you really want to keep around? But we have to make a decision and tell ourselves that we can't be everything to everyone, and we need to focus on what we do best. Which is Drupal.
Can we start an .asp project? Sure. We still have staff in-house who can probably do that. But we have decided, today, that we would rather have them focus on learning more Drupal, rather than to go back to the old system that we are trying to get rid of. Can we go learn Joomla to suppliment the guy who couldn't make it do what he wanted in the first place? Sure. We have some smart people who could learn anything they wanted. Will we lose these clients if we don't do what they want? Maybe. We are definitely feeling the pressure, but we also feel that if we don't move forward through this growing pain, we won't ever grow to be the Drupal shop we want to be.
FOWYDB - Focus On What You Do Best.
Here is a quote that my mother-in-law sent me, not knowing what I was writing my blog about - I think we are all on the same wavelength!
**It is better to say, "This one thing I do." than to say, "These forty things I dabble in."**
--Washington Gladden
Drupalcon DC Sponsorship
We're going to Drupalcon DC!
Are you?
Comments
Interesting dichotomy...
October 17, 2008 - 12:22am — Tom Geller (not verified)Maybe this isn't the place for larger philosophy... but that's not going to stop me. :)
I've always been highly distractible, and change focus frequently. (My very old Web site proclaimed me a "dilettante and poetaster", in fact.) I'm novelty-driven, and get excitement from learning new things. That's led me to have a varied, fun, and fascinating life.
But I've also come to see that I'm of most use to others when I (as Netscape founder Jim Clark puts it) "put all the wood behind one arrow". Some people take to this naturally; others, like me, need to learn it. As such skills benefit others, the payoff to me is different from "following my bliss" -- and it takes a while to appreciate those payoffs, too.
But back to your post. As a Drupalist, I would welcome the chance to learn ASP in the scenario above... but it would take me a while, and I wouldn't be as good a provider to the client as an experienced ASP consultant. So it's hard to turn away from such learning opportunities! But professionally, well, we serve others. As it should be.
[/end procrastination of real work] ;)
ASP
October 17, 2008 - 3:59pm — Ju young VanderwaterOne of the big reasons why we are trying to flush out ASP from our company is that we are moving away from suppoting any Microsoft OS on our servers. We have decided not to spend the time to train our people with a technology that is dying in our office... But as we grow, if we find something that might help us and our clients, (other than Drupal) we'll gladly learn it!
And philosophy is always welcome. :D It's fun!
i couldn't disagree more
October 17, 2008 - 7:08am — dalin (not verified)**It is better to say, "This one thing I do." than to say, "These forty things I dabble in."**M
I couldn't disagree more. No doubt there is a place in this world for specialists. But I feel that good generalists are in short supply. Your ASP experience has most probably made you a better Drupal developer. Your obscure hobby has also probably made you a better Drupal developer.
It is only by studying the interrelations between disciplines that we can truly innovate.
P.S. Your CAPTCHA is virtually impossible. And why do I have to fill it out succesfully multiple times.
Priorities
October 17, 2008 - 3:53pm — Ju young VanderwaterThe article was mainly about The Worx Company - I am not an ASP developer, nor a Drupal developer. But as I manage projects, with limited resources, we have to prioritize what we will spend time on. Should we spend more time on pursuing our obscure hobbies, or should we rather spend that time to pursue what we want to be good at? Our goal is to be a Drupal shop. Individually, I agree that "dabbling" in several disciplines might be better for some... As a company, I believe it is essential to prioritize - in our case, we have put Drupal above all others.
Thanks for the CAPTCHA comment! We will definitely look into it. I think we are thinking about implementing Mollom soon.
Same for us
October 18, 2008 - 9:17pm — Larry Garfield (not verified)Palantir used to be a CMS-agnostic shop. We'd work with anything, including our own in-house PHP CMS. The problem was, we never really got good at any of it, including our own in-house PHP CMS. :-) (Not that we were bad; we just weren't wizards in anything.)
Then a year and a half ago or so we switched to Drupal as our main dev environment. We are now as a team very well versed in Drupal, knowing it inside and out (some of us more inside :-) ), and our question is no longer "can we do this in Drupal?" but "how would we do this in Drupal?" That's resulted in far better results for our clients, and we're also trying to upgrade or shed some of our very-old clients where possible.
There's certainly advantages to having a broad knowledge base. When you get down to it, though, you'll be more productive as "King of one" than "Jack of all trades", if you know when to say "sorry, wrong trade", too. The brain only has so much room, and there's only so many hours in the day to learn things.
Of course, if you can be "Jack of all trades, King of one", (eg, Drupal ninja but also some experience in Zend Framework or Joomla or .NET or whatever), that makes you a better programmer and person. PHP is my native language, but the time I've spent writing Javascript has improved the quality of my PHP by exposing me to a different way of thinking. One of these days I want to learn Erlang or some other fully-functional language, just for the perspective, even though I doubt I'll do any serious production work in it.
Oh yes, and Mollom++!
:)
October 21, 2008 - 11:57pm — Ju young VanderwaterLarry, it was so good to meet you in Hungary - and the rest of the Palantir team! We also are working towards "how would we do this in Drupal?"
And oh, yes, Mollom. :) We know, we know... There's just not enough time in a day!
Post new comment