Tim Almond

When I’m working somewhere that I have travelled to by train, I often want to plan my departure. The options are often rubbish, and I end up phoning home because it’s easier than trying to mess around browsing the site on the browser.

As Paulie points out, someone’s done a little scraping job and written a much simpler version at traintimes.org.uk. Quick, simple, clean and with some really nice URL options that would mean that regular journeys can be easily set up.

Paulie is right about something else. How powerful bright and motivated developers are. It’s what I think governments don’t understand. It’s not like people building ships, where you have welders and riveters, where the numbers scale up, so that a ship of twice the size takes twice the hours of riveting. Software just don’t work like that. Small, highly motivated teams with management who focus on removing obstructions from their path can do incredible things per head, compared to bureaucratic teams. Software that can process a million transactions doesn’t need 1000 times the people that software for 1000 people does (it may need a little tweaking to cope with the scale).

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Tags: Technology //