Weblogs and Refridgerators, Part 1 of 2
So far, I'm enjoying the weblog process. It reminds me of another tool I used a few years ago...
Somewhere in the vicinity of 1997, some coworkers and I started a massive refactoring of our online encyclopaedia. HTML flat files dressed up by an inscrutable C CGI script was proving too inflexible, so we reimplemented the entire site as HTML records in an Informix database with a front end written in...Perl. It makes me shudder now, but I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm glad to say that is not the current implementation of our encyclopaedia.
One challenge during that project was that we didn't really have anyone acting as a technical manager. Even though some of the developers were quite senior in the organization, nobody wanted to step back and spend more time on planning (and consequently less time Perl-hacking). We had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do and what steps were involved, but we had to insure everyone was progressing. We also had to prevent people from stepping on each others' toes. One further complication was that of the nine or so developers, eight were working out of the La Jolla office, while one (me) was working in Chicago. Email works to a degree, but nine people can churn out quite a deluge of status and questions.
Then one day John wrote a Perl script that helped. It was a CGI program which he called "The Fridge". Imagine, if you will, the front of your refridgerator. Not only does it hold in the cold air and, in some cases, dispense ice, it also serves as the household bulletin board. It's where you put your to-do lists, it's where you tell your spouse or kid to do things while you are away; it's basically the heap of your life's temporary data.
Well, John designed a webpage that served the same function. The Fridge's screen was divided into a 3 by 3 grid (like the Brady Bunch). Each developer was given a square and could edit the text in that square at any time. In effect, each square in the grid was like a virtual Post-It note. If you had a question or if you wanted to let people know what you were working on, you just "stuck it" on the Fridge and eventually everyone would see it. No project managers or Gaant charts, just notes on the Fridge. It was a cool metaphor, and more importantly it worked as a project management tool (but not as an ice dispenser).
But of course, as an ambitious group of web programmers, we immediately started to improve it. First somebody added a separate window you could run in the background that would notify you whenever the fridge has changed. John said something like, "that's interesting, but it's not really according to the paradigm. Fridge notes are a pull technology." And we nodded in agreement and added it anyway.
Then in order to improve it even more, we started to invite more people to join the Fridge. Now we had management folks, QA folks and editors comingling with us on the Fridge door. Also strange and contrary to the metaphor, if you think about it. You don't invite your boss to put notes on your home refridgerator, but that's exactly what we did on our virtual Fridge. But of course, if it's useful for the developers, it should be useful for everybody else, right?
However, since we had so many people on our Fridge, we'd have posts that would sit unnoticed because they were off the screen. We still had 3 users per row, but we had a lot more rows. Fortunately there was an easy remedy. Someone modified the fridge to organize the posts in chronological order! Now the most recent posts would float to the top. Great feature right?
Then I made the greatest affront, er enhancement, of all. I didn't want to miss any posts, since every user only has one message at a time. So I added a chronological log of every post made to the fridge. Now I would never miss a single post, as long as I went to the log and made sure that I was up-to-date. It was a little challenging, because if any one person makes a mistake, it would of course get committed to the log anyway. And when that mistake was a piece of malformed HTML, the remainder of the log could get mangled. After some effort, though, I finished a scrubber that was pretty good at cleaning up the HTML. John was especially hesitant about this feature, but I added it despite his objections, because it didn't really hurt anything.
The Fridge started out great. Everything single feature we added to that Fridge was clever in its own right, and each one made the Fridge progressively worse. Now instead of a family fridge door for our notes to each other, we had a fridge door for the whole neighboorhood that would scream at everyone whenever you added a note, move notes around of its own accord, and would even record every note you EVER WROTE, INCLUDING EVERY MISTAKE. Once we added all those "features", usage of the Fridge dwindled and died. I don't think it was a coindicence.
What is the moral of this story? In short, John was right and I was wrong. Metaphors do matter. Instead of spending energy on every feature we could think of, we should have made a better Fridge door. And if you can't stick to the metaphor, you should just LEAVE IT ALONE.
My first didactic post. Punditry, here I come!
3:35:15 PM 
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