Ever since I was laid off from Nortel 10 years ago, and since my last programming job with iFire Technologies about 9 years ago, I’ve had a heck of a time trying to find something to feed my inner geek.

I can’t say I’ve sworn off software development of any kind – gaming, web application development, iPhone and iPad app development, etc…

I’ve dabbled off and on for a few years – even going as far as starting to write a simple Tic Tac Toe game that included wifi & bluetooth networking, game pieces that could be configurable, etc… I’ve just not finished what I started, and I can’t justify the $99 a year to pay for a developer license from Apple to ensure I can use my iPad or iPhone as the debugging platform.

More so, recently, I made  commitment to my partner to develop a calendar web-app that would allow users to book appointments via his website, integrated with Google Calendar using the Zend gData connector and PHP.

I have to admit, I have been slow to make progress but I have made some great progress with the logic.  I admit, I’ve been somewhat… scared.  This would be the first ‘product’ I have developed myself that would be live in stepping away from software development in 2003.  I have a bunch of what-ifs:

• What if the technology I have chosen is incorrect?
• What if Zend changes their gData connector?
• What if Google goes belly up?
• What if Google changes Calendar, taking away functionality like Apple has with .Mac, MobileMe and iCloud?
• What if someone hacks around and completely messes up my partner’s calendar for his business?

There is a part of me that says that I should mistrust leveraging a service like Google’s Calendar and I should just develop my own application using MySQL and PHP, that way I can control everything about the solution and keep all the various components up-to-date and let my web provider keep Apache up-to-date.

I think the plan I’m going to move forward is launch with Google Calendar, keep a close eye on how well the functionality is working and then develop the MySQL version and do a bang-up job on it.

All in the life of a home-brew CTO, I guess.  This is definitely good experience for my future.