Archive for February 2008
Let Me Go!
The adrenaline rush I just experience was only comparable to the adrenaline rush of doing illegal drag races (Yes, some years ago I was a irresponsible kid. I never crashed, though). Anyway, a few minutes ago we won the auction for the main domain we will use in our project: letmego.com! Expensive? Kinda, but I see tons of marketing potential on it.
We have decided to keep referring to the software engine of the project “Merrcury”.
By the way, this is the new ringtone of my cellphone as of today:
Alex
Of passwords and other demons
I just completed the documentation of the account management subsystem, one of the first subsystems that will be developed. Fortunately enough, I was able to borrow most of it from other projects I have worked in the past.
Alex
I love the way you look tonight
Tonight Maestro showed me the first draft of how the website is going to look. Simply put: It is amazing! Thank you Maestro! We will use green colors combined with Facebook-style fonts. I hope that by the time we go live, the trend hasn’t changed and we are still “in”.
Alex
Object Oriented and Service Oriented Architecture
I am still trying to figure out why I thought that service oriented architecture and object oriented architecture were two animals that couldn’t live together. Anyway, my misconception was solved.
We have agreed upon the architecture that we will follow. As usual, we based most of our decision in the book “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” by Martin Flowler. It has been my architectural bible for many years already. Thank you Martin! We love you!
We have also decided to split the Merrcury Engine into subsystems that will communicate to each other via web services. Although the benefit of this architecture is not going to be visible in the short term, we are sure it will help us in the future as we grow… and grow… and grow… 
Alex
Welcoming a Maestro!
Maestro started to work on the project today.
Epidaurrus no longer is
It seems that Epidaurus wasn’t as inspiring as I thought. The team decided it need to change and a new name pop up: Merrcury! We love it! Mercury is the Roman god of trade, profit, merchants, and travelers. Perfect for our project. As such, the project has been remanded Merrcury Project!
Alex
Not-so-extreme programming
The methodology we are going to use has been determined. We will use a custom methodology borrowing from extreme programming and the Rational Unified Process. We will write use cases at times and user stories other times. Why? I consider use cases more robust and desirable in most circumstances, and that is one of the few things I don’t like about extreme programming: it suggests the exclusive use of user stories.
We have also decided to work on HTML templates right away, not using wire framing. We can do this because Maestro is damn good at doing it! We won’t write test cases either, as all of the developers of the team are so good they won’t need another person doing quality assurance of their tasks following test cases. Use cases and user stories will be enough… Or at least I hope so.
We have decided to use a wiki to gather all the documentation of the project. Thank you MediaWiki!
Our project management tool won’t be a fancy one. We will adapt Mantis to our needs (http://www.mantisbt.org/). Thank you Mantis!
Alex
PS: Thank you Juan! I know I didn’t like the idea of using Mantis when you brought it up several years ago. Now I cannot live without it.
