savs seemed to agonise about posting it but I think his Top 10 crimes of Developer Engagement is spot on even if it might not be as amusing as Aral Balkan’s similar message.
I think it applies to my recent RFID development work too: the public information is fluffy and you have to hunt or reverse-engineer most of the technical info, the supplier websites are painful and there’s almost no interaction.
In the past, I’d been factoring in something between 50 and 100% extra time when our co-op needed to coordinate with unknown non-co-ops. With RFID hardware work, it was well over 300% when I last calculated it and that’s even though there was one pretty helpful RFID supplier. This sort of nonsense is painful, slows development massively, could kill useful technologies at birth and re-emphasises my commitment to use Open Standards as much as reasonable.
Have other people got similar horror stories to share? Can we get savs’s Top 10 Crimes under the noses of some high-profile people?