You may have heard the adage, ‘Programmers are tools that convert pizza and coffee into code’. This oft repeated phrase captures the imagination with its humour and apparent truth. It also captures the sentiment of many management types and those outside the developer community. So you could be forgiven for believing that, when the developers of St Barnabas Broadway (some of whom are Open Box Technology employees) were invited for dinner and drinks to discuss the Barneys website, we joined in like lemmings.
However, this sentiment is incorrect. Programmers and developers are not subservient tools that will do the bidding of the puppeteers, we require a good reason to spend time writing code. This is why companies like Google have grandiose mission statements such as “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and motto’s of “don’t be evil”. Without something to believe in, a big vision for something new and better, we do the pizza and coffee part of our adage without any code to show for it.