The demon in the details

The group has mostly been rushing the project for all of today. I spent most of my time making the edit page more useable, but when you start thinking about usability and curbing the user's ability to screw up the system, it ends up being a lot of work. Moreover, sometimes, you might hit your head against a wall for hours trying to think of a solution to make a site look better, more accessible... but it never seems to work out exactly the way you want it to. It kind of nags at the back of your mind that it can be better, but you don't know what can make it better.

Outside libraries that other people have provided are nice, things like prototype, scriptaculous... etc.. but the problem with javascript being able to tie everything in together is that you end up reusing common method names or variables... and sometimes it just doesn't work because you didn't write it yourself. Since I've been in C.S. a while, I've gotten used to knowing every inch of my code like the back of my hand. Magic makes me nervous and 'trust me the library does it' makes me nervous because -from experience- they never really do what you think they do. I do find ruby to be a nice language, but I admit there's still enough magic going on in it that I still feel nervous working with it. I don't regret learning it, because I'm sure if one day I need to make a website on the fly, I know that ruby can do the job. But for long term, large company, enterprise projects, I'm not so sure if ruby will be suitable. Either way, I always enjoy learning new things, and I've realized that getting ruby to work locally is much easier than playing around with php and apache for hours without any results.

Polishing is one of those things in a project that always drives me crazy. Not because I hate it, but because I'm kind of OCD about it, even if it's fine, I can't let it go, I don't know when or how to stop and sometimes I just burn out until the last minute before a turnin. I enjoy building things and working with the project, but I always have places to nitpick and I think everyone can see the flaws that I do, but usually they don't... usually they aren't even flaws at all, and maybe it's all the product of a very exhausted, not entirely sane mind at the end of the day.