When I finished school in 2003 I moved to Berlin and realized that it was a bad idea to enroll for business studies. All I wanted was to become self employed (actually entrepreneur, but I'm careful with this title..), so I started my own venture after 3 frustrating weeks at university. My brilliant idea was: create a useful CMS! Unfortunately, I had no clue about programming and even worse, about CMS. I'll skip the next 2,5 years until I once again realized, that it was also a bad idea to lock myself up for such a long time in order to develop a proprietary (!) system, that only some idiots would buy. I ultimately abandoned the development of the "alexo Impresario" (still loving the name) and came to Drupal. The good side of this rather sad story is that I learned (the hard way) how to code and understood the superiority of Open Source Software. I had tears in my eyes when I read this:
(Book "Drupal Development", Introduction)
The journey of a software developer is an interesting one. It starts with taking things apart and
inspecting the isolated components to try to understand the whole system. Next, you start poking at and hacking the system in an attempt to manipulate its behavior. This is how we learn — we hack.
You follow that pattern for some time until you reach a point of confidence where you can build your own systems from scratch. You might roll your own content management system, for example, deploy it on multiple sites, and think you’re changing the world.
But there comes a critical point, and it usually happens when you realize that the maintenance of your system starts to take up more time than building the features. You wish that you knew back when you started writing the system what you know now. You begin to see other systems emerge that can do what your system can do and more. There’s a community filled with people who are working together to improve the software, and you realize that they are, for the most part, smarter than you. And even more, the software is free.
It was a hard decision for me to take, but everything improved dramatically since I trashed my love-hated Impresario. Luckily, my first customer of that time is still my biggest sponsor and enjoys now the benefits of OSS.
(For everyone checking out my business website: this is out of date proprietary CMS marketing sh**, please ignore)
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