Alexander’s Blog – The Making of LetMeGo

The first Google I/O happened in San Francisco last week, on May 28th and 29th. We had the pleasure of being there with German. Being there cost us approximately USD 2,000, but it was definitely worth it. The Merrcury project will use some of the technologies that Google currently offers, such as Google Maps API. We were able to talk to some of the technical leaders of these projects. The answers we got from them, and the resulting ideas, would have taken weeks to be achieved by other means. On top of that, we were able to sneak out some information about the future plans of some of the ventures of Google that will saves us tons of time in the future! If that wasn’t enough, the food and the party thrown by Google were great.

Not everything was so great though. It is sad to see that many employees of Google have no idea about what other employees are doing in closely related areas. For example: in many cases the technical leaders of the Google Maps API had no idea what the plans for Google Earth were, even though they are supposed to be merging somehow. That is the price you pay when your team is that large….

Alex

As I previously wrote in the blog, German was working on writing the use cases for the customer relation management scope and susbsystem (we call it Cockerr). To be honest, i was afraid of the results. It wasn’t because of German (after all, he was who introduced me to the world of use cases). It was because of two other reasons:

First, transferring what I had in mind for Cockerr to either German or anybody else was a challenge. After many years of being in charge of the design and development of web applications, I have come to the conclusion that the best person for the job of writing the documentation, is the leader of the development team. As such, I am used to transfer that knowledge by, you guessed, writing the use cases by myself. Since German was the one writing the use cases, I had to try hard to tell German all I had thought of Cockerr so that he wouldn’t miss anything.

Second, even if I could tell German everything I had thought, I have found that the only way I actually know what I want, is by writing the use cases. By writing them myself, I come across many challenges that I didn’t think of before. When that happens I can think of a solution and document it right away. That is one of the many reasons I love use cases. This time, however, German was going to be the one facing the challenges. If he couldn’t come up with solutions on the fly, he would have had to ask me. I was afraid that such process could have slowed down significantly German’s task and end up taking more time than if I had written the use cases myself.

Well, on Monday German finished writing the use cases for Cockerr. German did a great job! Yes, it took him several days to write all the use cases, but I would bet that for most people, it would have taken several weeks. The first time I wrote a use case it took me a week…. and it was only one! Congrats German!

Alex

It has been a while since my last entry in the blog. We have been working very hard in several areas.

After nine weeks of having started its documentation, German just completed the alpha version of the web core! What is the web core, anyway? The web core is the platform that all subsystems will use to communicate with the users of our site. For example, the subsystem that manages the account of the users, Hendrrix, will use the web core as its main interface. Hendrrix, by itself, is unaware of any HTML code or CSS template. It all resides in the web core. We did a lot of customization to CakePHP to come up with the web core we wanted. The customization included creating a better localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n) solutions, automatically handling form creation and validation, automatically handling file uploads, building a powerful error management system, and much more. Great work German!

German will now work on writing the use cases of Cockerr, the subsystem that will manage our CRM efforts. It is the first time I am allowing somebody else in the team to write use cases. I am confident in German as he was the one that taught me about the existence of the use case methodology.

For my part, I just finished documenting the use cases and user interfaces of the Arrmstrong scope. Unfortunately, as with some other subsystems and scopes, I cannot tell just yet what is this system about. One of its cool features is that, for the first time in my professional career, we will use advanced mathematics learned in the university for a real life application. Now isn’t that cool?

Alex