Standing on the shoulders of giants
Learn from the best then apply what you’ve learned.
I’ve been enjoying 37Signals’ book Getting Real and wanted to share this thoughtful line from Manage Debt:
Hack together some bad code that’s functional but still a bit hairy and you’re building up debt. Throw together a design that’s good enough but not really good and you’ve done it again.
This quote resonated deeply with me. Know that this debt will get passed on to your predecessor if you leave the project and at some point, the debt has to be resolved.
Side projects and summer time
Now that Sale season is over, I typically spend the summer scrambling to complete the next round of changes. The Auxiliary went live with their revamped look and a few nice little widgets. I have 4 major projects running in tandem: building new web forms instead of asking the users to download and print .doc and .pdf files; testing the .net framework; converting sites to .net; and yet another site redesign. The last one will be the shortest project.
Building forms has really opened my eyes to the issue of Simplexity. I understand how a form should work and I have an idea of how to present it to a user so it’s easy to fill out. (Simple aspect). I get that it should look Simple to a user. Getting my code to check form fields and make the form run in a logical manner is incredibly hard. (Complex aspect.) The good news is, I know when I feel pain that I’m growing my skills.
Inspiring Youngling
While playing with Google Wave I came across a neat little extension called the Word Network Gadget. It’s a text-only mind mapping gadget. The author has also created 7 other gadgets for Wave, as of October 20th. Pretty impressive.
Created by antimatter15
Take a look at some of the other work antimatter15 has done. Truly inspiring work!
