Good developers are hard to find. That becomes painfully obvious when you look at the explosion of salaries in Silicon Valley and the software industry in general. Companies are doing anything they can to recruit developers from crazy bonuses to crazy workplace amenities. We’re guilty of it too. Our office has a pingpong table, a popcorn machine, a video game room, and a kegerator. It’s ridiculous, but I’m not complaining. As great as all the perks may sound, the day job of development is still not easy. A major contributor to developer frustration are the tools and technologies they work with day-to-day. Many of these tools were originally developed years ago to solve complex problems without regard for simplicity of use. 

These tools include pretty much anything a developer uses throughout their day including: application lifecycle management (ALM) software, bug tracking tools, and version control. However it doesn’t stop there, it can also include software tools they are integrating with to develop their product, APIs, customer facing software, or even databases. Weaving it all together has proven tedious and unnecessarily complicated. These age old tools were powerful and enabled the software industry to innovate because they solved problems, but they were not necessarily easy to work with. Recently we’ve seen a shift in the market where startups are succeeding because they are focusing on the developer too, not just the problem at hand.  

This isn’t a brand new phenomenon, but I’d say it’s something we’ve seen take shape in the last 5 years or so. It’s effectively specialization, where startups are carving out their one piece of the puzzle and making it so simple to work with that it’s just easier to pay them to do it than to bother to develop something in-house. This has been working really well for things like CRM, digital marketing, payment processing and even things that require more compute like natural language processing. Developers can build software solutions simply by integrating existing pieces together and adding their own twist to it. But most of the things I’ve mentioned are all application level, none of them have really been at the core of the application. What I’m trying to say is that there’s not really anything developer focused in the data access layer.  

HarperDB was well aware of this phenomenon before we started. Our founders were developers cobbling together existing solutions that were incredibly complex to integrate. That’s why when they started building HarperDB they made sure to focus on the developer first and foremost. We understand developers because we are developers. If you’re happy, we’re happy. Our database is accessed via a single endpoint API, that’s it, it really is that simple. Of course, if you already have an existing system you’d like to integrate we haven’t forgotten about you. We also offer native JDBC, ODBC, and ODATA drivers to make your integrations as easy as possible. 

 With good developers becoming scarcer than ever before, companies are being forced to place a higher value on their developers. Isn’t it only fair that software companies do the same? At HarperDB we believe in empowering developers to become champions of new software. Give us a try and see how we can make your data management solution easier than ever.