Other people’s cruft

I’ve been spending the best part of my week supporting other people’s technologies.

We get requests all the time asking us to implement freely available apps or tie into legacy systems with “web interfaces.” I have no problem with this (especially in cases where we’re already familiar with the app,) but I don’t like the risk of unknown. And it’s happening more lately

If our clients didn’t have budgets, we’d all be fine. We’d bid “time and materials.” Since they do, we bid projects based on how long we expect them to take. And while we could hypothetically pad these proposals based on the risk of unknown, we just don’t.

I’m not sure if this trend is coming from client expectations becoming more sophisticated or it’s coming from the increasing availability of free or ported applications. Either way, it’s something we’re dealing with a lot more lately.

It smells like change.