When you’ve been long enough in the software development business you start to notice patterns. One of those patterns recently surfaced again when someone in my team floated the idea that our system should be able to read or write Excel files. I’ve seen and implemented this particular request so many times that I got inspired to write it down as an adage. I’ve dubbed it Saalo’s Law of Software Development and it goes as follows:

Every piece of enterprise software eventually evolves into either reading or writing Excel files.

I originally posted this just to the company Slack where my peers unanimously agreed that yes, this is exactly what happens. There’s something about spreadsheets that makes them the universal translator of the business world – no matter how sophisticated your system, someone always needs that Excel import or export function.

So there you have my humble observation on how enterprise software works. My law may not be as well known (yet!) as Hofstadter’s, Brooks', or Parkinson’s laws, but maybe one day. 😁