Better ways of Tracking Projects? RSS The answer?

July 23rd, 2005

As my development team grows and grows I'm curious at what point things get lost. Management has to keep track of more and more individual developers trying to keep up to date with them on project status, timelines, customer issues, etc. Wikis are great for managing knowledge, however its a login, then surf around type of system. I saw my managers inbox one day and couldn't believe how many emails he got in a day, how could he keep track of what my team is up to if he has to get through 2000 messages just to see my status. Why not help him out and aggregate all that information into one place and save him the email space.

What would help keep track of developers? An RSS subscription system perhaps. Picture this... you fire off an email to: rss@mycompany.com. A script on the email server parses the subject and body of the email and transforms that into an RSS item with TITLE and DESCRIPTION which gets added to your personal RSS feed. Your manager/project manager then subscribes to developers or other employees personal feeds, open a browser based RSS reader and get a quick update on who is doing what.

Not only could this be valuable to individuals but projects as well, subscribing to project RSS feeds internally to see what is actively being done on your project. How about for large companies like Yahoo, Google, etc where developers probably have no idea what each other is up to. How cool would it be to subscribe to developers RSS feeds in another city to see what other people are working on.

kinda like this mock up http://meetoc.com/temp/emp_rss/

Cool Drag and Drop with Javascript

April 15th, 2005

Dietrich sent me this link to a javascript drag and drop sample. Its quite amazing how smooth it is. Really opens up your eyes to the possibilites of DHTML with XMLHTTPREQUEST for processing data as the user interacts with it. Much like GMail does if you've used that (I'm sure 90% of blog readers have gmail by now). JPSPAN is also a nice library to check out that creates a seemless interaction between php and javascript.. imagine being able to call PHP class methods FROM javascript. nice :)

http://tool-man.org/examples/dragging.html

** Note: these only work in firefox at the moment, IE support is coming soon

Great Localization Tip - Pig Latin!

April 12th, 2005

I just got a great tip from listening to a podcast interview with Joel, from "Joel on Software" who remembered a company who needed to create a program that needed to be localized in different languages so what they did was write everything in Pig Latin then English was the first localized language. This way you know right away if you forgot to localize a string in your program or not when you test it.
IE user name = userway amenay