Trotsky takes top honours again!

I won the sniper award last month!

I am always amazed by what a human can do in a few hours with an idea and a keyboard.

I have been playing "Call of Duty" with a few people on a Sunday evening to prepare for the working week ahead and I was very pleased when Jason decided to knock up something to display the server stats.

Well after a few late nights he has come up with CombatStats, a customisable toolkit that anyone can use to display their sad cod stats. Time and time again I see how easy it is for someone to take an idea and then deliver a working system in a matter of hours. It then takes a lot longer to iterate through the next two dozen implementations, but you can be sure that these systems are all built with a lot of love.

So, I would like to say thanks to all the people out there who are creating bookmarklets, templates, utilities and full blown applications with no thought of financial reward or personal advancement.

I'm really proud of all of you, so keep up the good work, and keep producing these little gems. Who knows, if anyone ever sorts out micropayments we might even be able to make a living from this stuff.

Comments

[Chris McEvoy]

I got the Sniper Award for June 2004.

[Chris McEvoy]

Synchronicity.

Just hours after posting this item I read an article on economist.com: Return of the homebrew coder

Another homebrew coder is Nick Bradbury, who lives in Franklin, Tennessee. He wrote one of the first web-publishing tools, called HomeSite, and sold it to Allaire, which is now part of Macromedia. Then he started Bradbury Software, which sells a web-page editor called TopStyle and a news-reading program called FeedDemon. Self-employment, he notes, has more than just financial benefits. “I put in more hours, but those hours are very flexible, which in my case means I can spend a great deal of time with my two kids,” he says. And he finds it very rewarding to know that his software is making people's lives a little easier—“something I rarely, if ever, experienced while working in the corporate world.”