His diary is one of the most entertaining historical sources I've ever read so I'm not at all surprised that Stephenson found a way to work it in. (One part of the diary that I remember thinking felt like a novel was when he rushes to bury his prized Italian olive oil in his backyard during the Great Fire of London.)
The whole thing's online and cross-referenced here by the way, highly recommended:
Actually, genuinely curious here, does anyone know of a solid (popular) equivalent of MS Access, but web-based? The feature I'd put emphasis on is rapid point-and-click form creation, not the database and tables part (for that of course there are plenty).
I've developped a few web applications and forms along the years, but never could I get something together as quick as I did when I decided to try MS Access, for a prototype app. E.g. I've used Django, yes I can create forms pretty quick, but with Access with _no programming_ and 2-3 hours of familiarization I could put up forms with create/edit/delete functionality in something like 30 minutes, along with the underlying schema.
I haven't touched it since I created that prototype, but I was left wondering what's the equivalent in the webapp world, for the basic CRUD use-case.
For some reason, people don't think of it in this context a lot, but this is EXACTLY what Salesforce.com does. In addition to the usual "Sales Cloud" licenses, there is a much cheaper "Force.com Platform" license that doesn't have any of the core sales features but gives you the database to play with.
100% point-and-click creation of new objects, relationships, forms, etc... Easy baked in reporting, import, and export. Workflow automation totally configurable without code. Thousands of apps on the AppExchange to add interesting features. And of course, when you need to add code, it's very easy to get started if you know OOP.
If you frequently have to create quick web-based systems that would have been MS Access, go check out https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead, grab a free SFDC org, and build something cool.
My employer was looking for a business process integration platform. We looked at Salesforce, MS Dyanics, Oracle. We decided to go with Django + Posgres. We're in the process of converting 100's Access apps and management spreadsheets at a fraction of the cost £170 per user per month. We where looking at over £200K PA before we started talking about systems integration. Similar costs from other suppliers. The management just wasn't interested in spending that kind of cash before we had anything to show for it.
Fieldbook (my project) has a pretty solid version of tables including a form view (detail page) for each record. It doesn't have a form builder yet, but we're definitely planning on it. We have had people switch from Access with good results. Beta invite for you: https://fieldbook.com/?bc=HN0818
Mendix is one such tool (or platform as it also includes a Cloud offering for hosting the applications). It has rapid application development for web/mobile apps. At its core, it has data schema creation, form building and visual application logic modelling. This is all included in one IDE which allows for integrity checks across the board (forms, logic and database). Competitors include OutSystems, Kony, etc.
It is proprietary and mostly focused on large companies.
Maybe the problem when I was searching was that actually MS Access is a narrow tool (centered around the database), whereas platforms that replaced it (RAD for mobile/web) offer a wider range of features, so searching for an "MS Access replacement" is searching with the wrong keyword given how these tools have evolved.
Still if I look at your site (Mendix) and my mindset is "I just want a few tables and a few simple forms", my guess is that if I were a non-developer I could be a bit overwhelmed. But as you say Mendix targets large companies.
I wouldn't recommend it though - as a long time FileMaker user and developer, I couldn't be happier to finally get out of this platform by learning a real web framework (Rails for me, Phoenix is on the horizon though).
FileMaker has its strengths, but the web isn't one of them. The results are subpar in my opinion and will always feel like a rapidly converted and FileMaker-branded, bloated and slow webapp. Just look at the generated HTML - it's an endless tree of nested divs.
Thanks for the pointer. I searched a bit at the time (2 years ago) and found a few platforms for rapid app development. I guess I didn't search hard enough, or I simply gave up because there was no obvious choice, like MS Access used to be. The person I developed the prototype for was also very wary of smaller platforms due to lock-in, risk of the company going bust, etc.
But Alpha Anywhere seems to have a long history and some traction, that's good to know.
You can try our Point and Click platform (http://MyDataOrganizer.com) for building custom business applications as per your workflow requirements.
Out of the box team based security can be immediately used and custom security with encryption for sensitive data is also available in addition to basic CRUD.
(I read that page when I was first reading about this the night of the spill, but had forgotten about it. Holohan is amazingly knowledgeable about old heating systems.)
Do you think/feel this affects how close-knit a team can be in your company?
From what you say you don't seem to use video much (for one-on-one), so a lot of visual/non-verbal is lost (also there are no non-work regular meetups, e.g. lunches, which I think helps with nurturing a bit of informality).
Also when someone is sitting next to me the threshold for asking a question is rather low, and when working remote I tend to waste more time looking for answers on my own. So my guess is that would affect productivity also.
But still I wonder if there are many of these completely remote largish (> 15, say) companies. It's a very interesting model.
I'm not at all knowledgeable about the solar industry, but I'm curious: how would software reduce the "soft" costs described in that third link (NREL)? It seems to me to be a bunch of costs related to the actors involved, and I don't see how software would help with that. Also, do you have examples of such software?
Sure! My startup, UtilityAPI.com, is an example of one that is targeting customer acquisition soft costs (10% of total installed cost). When you want to write a proposal for someone thinking about going solar, you need their utility usage and billing history. Collecting that data is currently a very time consuming and painful process, so not only do you spend a lot of man-hours on it, you also lose a huge portion of your funnel at this step.
We are building software that automates that utility data collection process, so solar companies can just bake it into their online forms/apps/internal tools. We estimate we can shave 5-10% off the installed price of solar due to time savings and increased conversion. The Department of Energy agreed and recently awarded us with $25k to build SDKs for our API (with the opportunity for $100k more in May)[1].
Ok I see, you're saying that hidden away in the various strata in that graph are, e.g., process inefficiencies which software can eat away. I was naively looking for something that would solve many categories at once, and being an outsider I think of solar as mostly hardware (like you said). Thanks for the answer.
