Iterating Over Increasingly More Interesting Data

While talking with a coworker yesterday I think I accidentally summed up a career spent in software development in a single sentence.  What I said was that I feel like as technology has evolved from platform to platform, programming model to programming model, all we’re really doing is iterating over increasingly more interesting data.

When I first started writing code in QBasic in highschool, I was iterating over arrays of ints and strings that had some relevance to the text-based games I was writing.  In college I learned OOP and was iterating over my own new data types such as “words”, which were strings that could be associated with a proper spelling and corrected accordingly.  In my first job as a professional software developer I was iterating over residential and commercial addresses in a G.I.S. system in order to more effeciently map routes for waste collection services.

Since then I’ve iterated over financial transactions, packages awaiting shipment confirmation, tickets being purchased for concerts, and a thousand other objects of more and more interesting classes.

I don’t really have any conclusion to take away from this, only that I wonder what we’ll be iterating over next.

Twitter-Induced Introspection

Twitter sure is a cool service, but I’m just not quite sure how to use it for myself. I have had an account for over a year and have only updated my status five times. I’m neither proud of this nor ashamed.

There are two primary reasons for my lack of tweeting thus far. One is that a good deal of my tweets would be work related and a good deal of them would very much not be work related. Some of my coworkers follow me and could see my non-work-related tweets and think to themselves, “why’d we hire this clown?” And honestly, I would do most of my tweeting while at work simply because I’m on my computer more while at work. Sure I can tweet from my phone, but would I? I don’t know.

The other reason is that I’m not sure that I have anything of very much interest to say. Therefore, anyone who would follow me avidly has got to be a weirdo and I don’t necessarily want them following me. I mean sure my blog posts rock but there’s no way I can maintain this level of awesomeness in a constant stream of 140 character snippets.

What interests me though in the Twitter system is the idea of a corporate presence. Maybe corporate isn’t the best word for it, but what what I basically mean is when a Twitter user doesn’t represent a single human person, but a group of people or an idea. This could manifest as a corporate entity, or a club, or a newsletter, etc. I guess this notion is what has led to much of the field known as Social Media.

The easy-to-use and freely available Twitter API is, in my opinion, the true reason Twitter has gained so much momentum. It’s not only easy to tweet, it’s easy to write new software that let’s you tweet. Most of the apps out there right now that let you interface with the Twitter system are the same- a fancy cool UI front end that lets you tweet and organize your friends’ timelines. What I haven’t seen (much of anyway) is an app that let’s you work with Twitter from the standpoint of a corporation, or any entity that is larger than just yourself.

So now I’m putting together plans for a Social Media Dashboard application. Initially it will be aimed square at Twitter and its uses, but I wanted it named Social Media Dashboard and not Twitter Dashboard because I want it to be extended to Facebook and other API’s as well. It will act as a single client that lets you manage your company or group’s social media profile.

I’ve been gaining some added insight recently through the book Twitter Power, by Joel Comm (@joelcomm). Despite some wordy and repetitive moments and ideas in his writing, I’ve enjoyed the read and its given me some great ideas for key features in my app.

If anyone has plans for something similar, would like to colaborate, or would just like to pitch ideas for functionality, please comment on this post! Alternatively, you can DM or reply to me on Twitter at @libdsoftware.

Hope to hear from you!