Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2002
20:48 - Whew... At Long Last	(top)
So finally, after many months of coding, the new PacketTrack system at work has gone live for everyone to use. On Thursday, at the all-hands meeting, we told everybody of its existence and gave a short visual demo, followed by a company-wide e-mail explaining what the various components were for; finally, yesterday, Kris put the final piece in place: Bugsy, the bug database. Bugsy is the only component (out of seven) that I didn't write, and so Kris used a lot of my code in order to centralize functionality like the user authentication, role enforcement, and cookie handling. As such, he was treading on ground that I knew really well, but that he was new to-- and that was a bit of a reversal from the usual state of things. Usually, he's the one to explain to me various user-interface principles that are often ignored by the novice tool-builder, namely (for instance) that the UI has to follow the user's expected workflow-- not whatever functionality path is most convenient to code. It's almost an axiom that the simplest, most elegant code in the back-end translates to a high learning curve and non-intuitive UI elements in the front-end. So while it's tempting from a coding standpoint to have a list of "Actions" that contain items like "Modify Owner, Resolution, and State", it's completely meaningless to the user. The user wants buttons that say things like "Close Bug", even though such a function-- implemented individually-- makes for inefficient back-end code. But hey, that's the way these things go. So while all this time I've been the one trying to learn and absorb and demonstrate understanding of these principles in my code, I now have the interesting experience of seeing the person I've been learning from falling prey to many of the same pitfalls that I've been trying so hard to avoid. All of a sudden I'm the one with the experience, and I'm the Code Nazi. Ha haah! It's a reversal of fortune! Nah, don't get me wrong. It's not like this is a rivalry or anything. I'm just really enjoying being done with my part of it. `:)` And if that means I get to dispense some of the wisdom I've accumulated through months of trial and error and failure and experience... hey, bonus!