Hi, this is Don Hames, president of Providence Software Solutions, the home of XVT Cross Platform Studio 2010. It seems it is increasingly more difficult to do our jobs as developers these days. So often projects in businesses are understaffed, under budgeted and always in a hurry—expected to do more with fewer resources and yet be more efficient and effective. Still, we all work hard and apply our years of experience and training to build our software applications and products. We have pride in our craft.

Added to the lack of resources is the hectic pace. We try to put a due date on a fuzzy process that is dependent on variables over which we rarely have control. Following Best Practices as well as we can—always in a state of learning, using common sense and logic—we design and build software products to meet a need. Our skills have to be broad, our experience varied, and our ability and desire to learn has to be strong. We all have favorite editors, debuggers, compilers and tools we use to do our job. We enjoy what we do and we are good at it. And the pay is not bad either.