It's Been One of Those 90% Projects

It’s been years since I had one of those projects.  You know, the kind that present themselves as simple little deals, no muss no fuss.  Then you get started and it all begins to fall apart.  If you’ve been doing just about any job for very long you can probably relate.

This one started out innocently enough.  Build a polls add in for a CMS system.  Hindsight being 20/20 I should have seen some warning signs.  First, we had just moved to a new version of our editor.  Second, we had just moved to a new version of the development framework.  Third, we would be moving to a new data access method.  Fourth, we woud be mixing in a ton of third party AJAX controls.

As the whole thing kicked off it looked like it was going to go along swimmingly.  The proof of concept stuff worked great.  It wasn’t until the production code was being written that the wheels completely fell off.  The first problems occurred putting the new data access layer into our framework.  It seems it really isn’t designed to work the way we (and many other shops) really need it to.  It’s designed to be used in one-off custom applications much moreso than as a reusable component in other systems.

Then the AJAX controls began interfering with each other.  Nothing too dramatic at first, and I was able to work around several of the situations.  However, I was never able to get past that 90% point.  You know, that point where you know you’re this close, and if you could just iron out this one wrinkle it would be done.  Only when you finally get that wrinkle ironed out you find out that a sleeve just fell off the shirt, causing you to go back to the drawing board on parts of the project.

Then about three weeks into the project disaster struck.  I updated my source code trunk and it wiped out almost all of my files.  Different source code files were at different points in time, and nothing jived with anything else.  It seems the IDE integrated source control application hadn’t been committing files and had some strange problems.

So here we sit, with some of the UI elements of the application scaled way back and with me rebuilding a significant amount of the work I spent so much time doing already.  I should have this project completed tonight or tomorrow.  Knock on wood.

It was probably my time.  Heck, I was probably overdue.  Next time it’s someone else’s turn, though.