So for those who weren’t already aware, on October 7th I gave my two weeks notice to my supervisor at Purdue. After just over 21 months, I was ready to be free of that place. Well, I was ready to be free much farther back than that, but I was finally presented an opportunity too good to pass up in favor of the stability and large perks that Purdue offered.
Software Installation is an area that has many issues, and for a variety of reasons. I have but one reason how this can be: Developers suck and very few possess any foresight. It baffles me on at least a weekly basis, how a person or team of people can be smart enough to write a functional application on any platform, yet be so stunningly ignorant of the environment in which their applications will be running. They build registration data into installers. They put registry keys in place at install time, with no heuristics in-program to handle things in the event they’re not there. I could go on for a while… Everybody is guilty of it, from the biggest shops (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk), all the way to some open source projects.