I’m ashamed to admit that sometimes, I hit the programming reddit and comment on stories. I try to keep my comments relevant, on-topic, and related to the discussion, in that order.

Someone — who is not important, nor is the discussion — called me out and told me I wasn’t doing “real” development because I developed on a laptop, and any “real” development must take place on a desktop machine that has the power to handle thousands of source files and the debugger to interactively prod the application and so on.

I’d like to take this moment to remind everyone that our biggest client won the 2007 Inc. 500, so yeah; maybe I’m not developing simulations of the human brain, maybe I’m not developing “enterprise-level code” (and thank all that is good for that blessing), but my clients are reaping the benefits of my work, and that’s all that matters.

That, and that I get to swim in a vault of money Scrooge McDuck-style by the time I’m 30.

I’d have thought that the whole “real development” thing would have popped with the first bubble back in the ’90s. Seriously, we develop software! Some people develop software that requires the state-of-the-art, and some people develop equally awesome software that does not.

My software should not be judged by how many source files or lines of code I have. It should not be judged by how much it costs or how much I got paid to make it. It may even matter how optimized or clean my code is. My software should be judged on the value it brings to people. All other things come after that.