web-developmentI have a family friend who’s been thinking about getting some software written, and he wants me to write it. It’s a pretty serious job, and he already has some investors lined up to fund it. He’s been thinking and talking about it for a few months, and it isn’t the “rush to market and beat everyone else” kind of startup, any more than any other startup is.
I’m a .NET web developer, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the next version of ASP.NET vNext, ASP.NET 5. It’s in preview right now and I’m happy not touching it until it RTMs, which I understand should be happening “pretty soon.”
At what point is it reasonable to delay a project for an upcoming release of this nature?
I don’t care to get into many details, since this isn’t even limited to this release of ASP, or .NET in general, but ultimately this is the next major-version release, and with that, it has a lot of new and exciting cloud features, and some better support for scenarios that I deal with day-to-day.
I figure if I start this project right now on the current version of ASP, I’ll be stuck dealing with upgrading soon, and since this is a major release, they aren’t promising anything about that to be a clean and easy change. I’ll have to upgrade some other software, but it seems a waste to spend what could turn into maybe a few weeks on this, then have to spend another week upgrading. On the other hand, if I wait a few weeks and it doesn’t come out, then another few weeks pass, and another, then it would be worth it.
So, given the general uncertainty of such major release dates, at what point does it become reasonable to wait it out? When does stress of waiting out a release overcome the stress of upgrading a project?
I’m interested to know both in a situation like this, where to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a known release date yet, and even in a situation where there was one.
Start writing it now with today’s tools.
Tomorrow’s tools will always be better than todays.
They will always be just a few weeks away.
But even if they came out yesterday and had major new features which could make the project go smoother, I would recommend that you use today’s tools, today!
New tools take time to learn and more importantly, to master.
Let someone else make the newbee mistakes.
Let someone else make the unexpected discoveries.
Stick with the tools you know so that you can get results in the time and at the quality level that you desire.
If the project succeeds, then two years from now you will be writing it all over again anyway to adapt for scale and to integrate insights which you learned along the way.
You can use the .Next for that rewrite.
Good Luck!
…now get writing!
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