Chris Stead.com

I have a particular project that I work on every so often. It’s actually kind of a meta-project as I have to maintain a web-based project queue and management system, so it is a project for the sake of projects. Spiffy eh? Anyway, I haven’t had this thing break in a while which either means that I did such a nice, robust job of coding the darn thing that it is unbreakable (sure it is) or more likely, nobody has pushed this thing to the breaking point. Given enough time and enough monkeys. All of that aside, every so often, my boss comes up with new things that she would like the system to do, and I have to build them in. Fortunately, I built it in such a way that most everything just kind of “plugs in” not so much that I have an API and whatnot, but rather, I can simply build out a module and then just run an include and use it. Neat, isn’t it?

So, today I was told that she really wanted to be able to update team members on a project and then update the status of said users. Now, the way the thing works is you update the list of team members on a project and then edit the project again to set the status. This is a little cumbersome, we’ve discovered, simply because we don’t use the system the way we thought we would. Isn’t this always the case? So, my boss specifically, goes and toys with the team members as she is working on a project. This is dandy, except that she has to update the team and then go find the project again, right away. Not so good. What she asked for is a way to update the team and then immediately update the status of any given member of the new team list. Continue Reading »

Happy new year! Going into the start of the new year, I have a project that has carried over from the moment I started my current job. I am working on the information architecture and interaction design of a web-based insurance tool. Something that I have run into recently is a document structure that was developed using XML containers. This, in and of itself, is not an issue. XML is a wonderful tool for dividing information up in a useful way. The problem lies in how the system is implemented. This, my friends, is where I ran into trouble with a particular detail in this project. Call it the proverbial bump in the road.

Generally speaking, when dealing with a database like one I use a lot, MySQL, you can run queries to retrieve data in any way you like. So long as the basic design is reasonably flexible, you can return anything you want. Apparently this isn’t so with the XML structure that was used on my current project. People would ask, ‘why is this a problem?’ On the outset it doesn’t seem like it would be. You figure out how you want to return the data and then you simply structure the XML containers appropriately. Great! Now along I come and I say, ‘this model stinks. The usability is nonexistent and we want to change the structure.’ Now what? Continue Reading »