The Developer Audience

I wish we could just call developers users. There are so many developers in the world, that it almost makes perfect sense that we consider them users. Look at all the software, in particular, look at the open source projects on github. They're disproportionately geared toward developers. In essence, we're creating tool software where the users are other developers just like ourselves. Some may say that is a problem — too many tools, not enough applications to solve specific problems. Software not applied. On the other hand, too many tools is kind of hard to believe. There is such thing as too much choice, and under these conditions, only the strong survive. The great thing about tools, however, is that even if you've familiarized yourself with a specific tool that doesn't have a large community of supporters, you're free to either continue using as is, or to continue developing the tool. Either way, you're using it for your own project, which may happen to be another tool, or an application that a more typical user needs. Tools are just software. Developers are just users. It's not just in the open source space where tools are fundamental to the software development process — I hear Visual Studio has a few customers too. Myself, leaning toward the open source end of the spectrum, can't help but wonder — how do projects better serve their primary users when they are developers?