Tuesday, July 8, 2008

A long night.......

Sometimes you just need to dig in and get your hands dirty to really understand what you're dealing with. I spent a LONG LONG night last night understanding:
CodeIgniter MVC and jQuery (including ajax-forms and simpleTree)

Here's the end result: IT Project Guide-Risk Management

You'll probably not notice much (and potentially nothing if I'm working on it and break something) - but behind the scenes there's a lot of MVC, ajax and CSS (no tables) going on. I think I gave myself a master's training course in heavy duty coding. Some take aways:
  • MVC does force you to be a better programmer, even during the initial investigative/hacking phases
  • CodeIgniter is solid...and has a great forum and support community (a big plus)
  • javascript is javascript no matter how you dress it up - jQuery will make you life better, but the underlying javascript will remain problematic and buggy to work with
  • well planned css does make development and design changes much easier (do away with those tables)
  • not everything works as planned (lots of problems refreshing the tree menu) - but there aways seems to be a way to get what you want done (even if it involves some serious banging of the head against the wall)
  • small changes with instant results is gratifying (aka good programming) as opposed to some tasks in project management (aka waiting by the phone for a developer to let you know when the system will be fixed)
Anyway - it was a long long very good night....next steps: potentially moving from the IT Project Guide - PM (project management) tool to IT Project Guide - RM (risk management) - basically a complete rewrite

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for share these tips with us, Meade! I think that THIS is the proper conduct of Project Managers: share the knowledge obtained with the personal experience. More Project Managers doing the same will someday create a great index of pratics of IT planning. Praise you!
    At last, I would like to suggest an e-book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches. It's a very good book. I pretend to use this one whem I become a Proj.Manager. The book is available at: http://itprojectguide.blogspot.com/2008/07/long-night.html . Good reading!

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  2. Thanks for share these tips with us, Meade! I think that THIS is the proper conduct of Project Managers: share the knowledge obtained with the personal experience. More Project Managers doing the same will someday create a great index of pratics of IT planning. Praise you!
    At last, I would like to suggest an e-book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches. It's a very good book. I pretend to use this one whem I become a Proj.Manager. The book is available at internet for free. Ask for the god of knowledge (www.google.com). Good reading!

    ReplyDelete