Code and Whatnot

We’re primed to launch 3 customers in the coming week, which always makes the boss happy. The task of keeping track of all outstanding work has slowly begun to make sense to me. dotProject was working out for me (alone) for 2 or 3 weeks, but as I was filling in all the information about our clients and our contacts, I realized that the little annoyances with the interface would be too much for the 2 primary people I work with. Essentially, I did my best to use dotProject while pretending to be my boss, and again while pretending to be my development partner. Both times I became frustrated and gave up. It’s worth noting that 2 other project management systems have been unable to captivate my cohorts (and me).

I can imagine a project management system that would work for us. It would be something like the Firefox to dotProject’s Netscape. In dotProject, when I’m adding a contact, I need to choose from a dropdown of companies that have all been added to the companies table to fill in the person’s company. Adding every company with which we have contact to the companies table sucks for two reasons: 1) It’s extra work, and it’s unnecessary; and more notably 2) all of those companies will end up on every company dropdown all over dotProject, potentially making it much harder to select our own company as the primary for each project. Frankly, I either want less normalized data, or I just want a project management system that is designed to assume that only one company is doing the work. This is only an example of what bugs me about dotProject; the general, pervasive problem is that it tries to do too much, and ends up with a really obtuse interface.

With AJAX maturing, I see great things ahead for open-source, web-based enterprise software. In the case of project managment, I’m gonna have to do without a software solution for a while. For the time being, my overused notebook and the wiki are going to be my trusted repositories for task and project information. With practice, I’ve learned I can swing it this way. Few or no balls are being dropped now that I’m in my position, and that makes me feel pretty good.

In other news:

If I’m not forced to move out of my current office before UPS comes through with my books on Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails, I’ll be a happy man.

I’m looking for a new apartment. There is a beautiful 4-bedroom for next to nothing that I’ve been dreaming about, but the broker won’t seem to return my phone calls. Really, I could move anywhere. Thankfully, I don’t think the world will come crashing down if I don’t find myself a place by October 1st. Still, it’s a stressful process, and I’ll be relieved when it’s over. As it stands, I can’t really get anything done at home. When I live in a new place, my home office will become the development headquarters for the company I work for (Hey, we’re still small! At least they’ve begun subsidizing my health insurance), and that will make me better equipped to work on my pet projects after work.

I don’t know if I’ve ever adequately described my office before, but I work in someone else’s home office, and have since March. However, that someone else is no longer working in his home office, which leaves me working by myself. Listening to Rhapsody all day and singing along in my solitude is either saving my sanity or proving that I have none. At this very moment, I’m familiarizing myself with the post-Vitalogy Pearl Jam albums. Not too shabby.

And finally, if you like to concern yourself with the overall trends that are shaping the near and distant future, you should go see what the venerable DeWitt has to say about IE 7, the future of web search, and the decentralization of the web.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2005 at 10:13 am and is filed under news, products, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.