Code
Daily milestones
In an attempt to keep the development project I’m working on from getting bogged down, I’ve setup milestones that are between four weeks and one week long. (This organization, like most others, does not have a history of finishing software on time. Feature creep is a big problem. In my young, naive thinking, I’m trying to give us deadlines often enough that we can are forced to just do the most valuable parts of things, and not begin endlessly wandering around adding features, and rediscussing already discussed things.)
We nailed the first milestone. We did exactly what we needed to, no extra fluff, exactly on time. But I’m a little behind on the second milestone. Today I realized the difference between the two. Last time I semi-accidently made daily milestones to reach our big milestone. This I did not.
With the micro-milestones(AKA Inch pebbles ), I could instantly see if we were getting behind schedule, and more importantly be working on important things and not go wandering into the bushes.
Monday morning, we are having inch pebbles again. Lesson One: Learned.
Dear User
My little brother was laughing this morning at breakfast about a new virus he had received - the virus claimed to be from his email server administrators (which would be me). Mutated Monkeys also is also enjoying the fun.Looks like bagle.j is at work. Hope my grandmother does not get receive it.
Rewarding beta users
Joel discusses running beta tests.8. We have a policy of giving a free copy of the software to anyone who sends any feedback, positive, negative, whatever.A while back I donated to the developer of an excellent donationware Mac app. Later the developer announced that the program was going to go to the next level, and become normal commercial software. I got into the closed beta of the new software, used the software often, gave feedback, and spotted several bugs. When the full version came out I got an email saying I could get a measly $4.50 off the purchase price. That was not what I was expecting. I still have not purchased the new version. (Go figure human nature, I get a discount coupon and get mad. )
Hebrew
I'm thinking of learning Hebrew. It looks irresistibly like code. So far I have acquired a Hebrew "Old Testament" and learned three letters so far. Time will tell how if I manage to allocate enough time to learning it, since at present it is merely a whim.
BusinessWorks upgrade crawls
My Dad's company is upgrading to the new version of their accounting package, BusinessWorks. To convert on a duel xeon workstation just 3.5 megs of accounting data to the new version format, has taken more than an hour - before we gave up and left it to run overnight! We did not believe the converter program when it ordered us to "Run this at the end of the workday. May take more than ten hours to complete." I just don't understand how you can spend HOURS converting three floppy disks work of data. I just really, really don't understand it. Every night one of the websites I coded downloads about 50 megs of data on 50,000 homes. It does several different data transformations (rearranging about 30 items per listing, and doing some other data lookups), imports it into a mysql database, and indexes the data - in about one minute on a cheap PIII 800. I really, really don't understand a time measured in hours for 3.5 megs of data. But then, this is from the company whose home page says: