The Daily Tangent

Had a co-worker friend at work demo SQL 2008 Report Builder yesterday.

Click once app, automatically “friendly names” all your tables and columns, let’s end users load up reports and customize them like Access, let’s end users save their tweaked reports back out to Sharepoint to share..   I could go on… It comes with wizards to generate graphs, tables, KPI’s, gauges, reports, all sorts of stuff.  Insane.

The quality and capabilities of this tool for end-users and it’s smarts in “dumbing down” databases into simple objects for end users is amazing.  It got me thinking about how users are becoming more and more empowered and how that could really impact the job landscape for developers.

More and more development is getting into the end users hands.  If I was still coding day to day I’d be afraid that I wouldn’t have a job in 10 years.  The day of the developer is fast shrinking as the dawn of user empowerment looms on the horizon.

What offshoring couldn’t snub out will soon see a demise at the hand of widgets, gadgets, plugins, and wizards put directly into the hands of employees that GREW UP with a keyboard and mouse in hand.  You already see it today in the consumer side with things like iGoogle, Yahoo Pipes, etc.  It’s only a matter of time before it matures enough to be introduced into the Enterprise.