Following Edge

This week I'm embarking on a new project. When I say that, I don't mean that I'll get to neglect any of the other responsibilities or projects already on my plate and I don't mean that this new project is new since Keith has been working on it for a while.

Keith has been working on this huge project by himself for almost a year. The bad news is that the company has been interrupting his work almost half that time with work on other things, so people waiting for the big project have been wondering about progress. The good news is that the other work made his work environment sane. When he finally got to work every day for months on the same project with no interruptions, no assistance and little contact with others, it turned out to be as bad as you might imagine.

The truth is that everyone (even those of us who think we'd love to be in a dimly lit room with cases of Mountain Dew and cases of Top Ramen and a computer with the best computer programming tools) need human contact and a variety of work to keep us sane and also to provide the discourse and negotiation necessary to make the best decisions in our work.

While I was trying to keep contact with Keith to be sure to keep the big project coordinated with the company's big goals, I should have known from experience that his work environment would be impossible and lead him into a spiral of isolation and unproductive work. I didn't think about that until I didn't hear from Keith for increasing amounts of time and finally had to have an intervention. The good news is that a day visiting with him out on my farm woke me up to the obvious that he needed to work regularly with someone to help with project management decisions, technical planning and with the actual programming work. And that person had to be me not only because of the required experience and skills, but because Keith and I work well together.

Victor called me to thank me for being a mensch (A decent, upright, honorable person, but more than that, as with most Yiddish words) in helping Keith get back on top of things. If I'm a mensch, it's only because I think people deserve to love what they're doing, especially when it's someone like Keith with great intelligence, insight, and technical skill.

We've started this week with me coming up to speed on the basic design of the project. Keith told me that he was sure that his most recent work (during the downward spiral) pointed to a portion of the code that needed to be greatly reworked. Keith was right on (as he is with many technical things) and we determined that almost all the basic tenets of the most recent part of the project were pushing things in the wrong direction and that whole part would need to be scrapped. The great part of this is that the new design has the hallmarks of a great design: simple, easily answers additional questions, and confirming to well-known best practices of computing. I'm very excited about it.

The basic issue is how the new project will look to the users. The project (unlike my big project that was cancelled a year ago) is going to be used from a web browser instead of being a program of its own. Even if you're not a programming expert, you know that there is something about the way that web pages work that's different than the way a regular program works. Basically, a web page takes you through steps from one "page" to another so that the "server" can provide more information in each step. A regular program often updates information on the screen as you click on things without moving to a whole new window. It's much more efficient. The portion of the project we're working on will 1) make a web browser work like a regular program in almost all ways, and 2) do it all by using programs written in Javascript language (which no one has believed in 10 years is capable of writing whole programs) , and 3) do it with Javascript programs that are written by a computer, not by us (cutting-edge computers programming computers stuff), and 4) we'll do those 3 impossible things within a month or so.

Enough telling you about it... I have to get back to working on it. It's only 10:30 at night.