Coding by the Beach

So today Steve Jobs announced the iPad, after more than a year of successfully making the public speculate and generate free publicity.

This will also mark my coming back to this blog, after almost a year of complete abandonment.

Where have I been all this time? Well, nowhere. I just haven’t had the will to write. Mental block, some people call it. Not that I have not learnt anything new anyway, but the last few months of work has been primarily requirements gathering and analysis.

The kind of work associated with requirements gathering is tougher than coding, by a lot. I now have even greater respect for those people who call themselves ‘business analysts’. Well, all I have done was just organizing documents from the client (whom until now has been looking for a better way to manage information other than email – the team suggested a change but was unable to convince the management), but the real challenge is how to organize these documents so they do not flood my team (myself included) with emails, and at the same time, decrease confusion (wordy and inconsistent requirements documents are coders’ public enemy #1, not to mention confusing terminologies, often with multiple meanings).

Well, wiki comes to the rescue! The team, after looking at the millions of alternatives, chose XWiki. Although it has been developed since 2003, same year that MediaWiki (most popular wiki software, partly due to the ubiquity of Wikipedia) was also developed, it has more built-in organization features (like the notion of ‘wiki space’). Its weakness is relative unavailability of plugins and extensions (about 40 applications (some not updated and not working on the latest version), and 40 plugins(similar status)) compared to MediaWiki (thousands of extensions). When a client requested a feature to globally edit article sections, I could not find such plugin already developed (although there are ways to work around it, they all amounted to about similar number of clicks and about the same level of obscurity as if using the traditional Microsoft Word and PDF documents).

Anyway, time to go to work.