day -24: pick a stick
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
You come to a point in every project where the existing material is so overwhelming, heavy & difficult to work with you just start to remove parts until it falls apart. Like the pick-a-stick game, where you have a bunch of sticks on a flat surface and you pick one by without disturbing the remaining ones.
Today we played that game with the back-end. There are so much functionality that’s not used anymore and it’s all nested, looking pretty much like a pile of sticks, making it hard to understand where to start work & change. So far the status is: ‘it should work’ and the good thing is we can always do a rollback if we realize we picked the wrong stick.
ETS
We also had our first Exploratory Testing Session today with the new iPhone app. The exercise was quite simple. Log in. But even the simplest of tasks does fail and the mission of ET sessions is to make it fail, and find out why. I think in many processes that step of development is missing. We made it fail, and fixed the bugs that caused it.
Since I’ve started to work agile, scrum and all that this means I just realize how many other areas that could be applied, not just software developments. Having sprints, daily stand-ups, follow-ups etc. is making you progress fun & fast. When you run in to problems, you solve them fast, then move on.
Facebook Connect & OAuth
Since we changed the authentication model we had to change the clients too, both the iPhone app and the web app. There’s been some difficulties on the web app with setting the cookie, but they seem to have found the problem. If so, the web app should be up running any time.
What we found out in this process however is that the new authentication model is not very streamlined for an Open API and third party developers. It’s clumsy in the way the application developer has to authorize themselves.
For now it’s ok since the API is not yet open and it’s only ourselves who develop on it, but we’ll change when the opening day comes. OAuth seems to be the answer. Twitter just took the step to discontinue basic authentication to only use OAuth, which is a safer, easier & in many ways better authentication model.
daily -25: neo now or no neo
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
We’ve been discussing fourth and back for quite some time now what to do with the back-end. Is it good enough for production, is it stable, is it scalable? Should we keep it, or should we build from scratch. It’s always a hard decision. What’s best in the long run, and what’s best within the current constraints: time & deadlines.
There’s no doubt that this project is highly suitable for Neo4J, a graph database, specialized on relations. I guess I should start to warn that I have no database knowledge whatsoever, but I do understand the difference between a relation database and a graph database. A relation database is not as good on relations as a graph database, ironically enough.
Yesterday and today the back-end team did a spike, to see what path to walk. New back-end now, or later. For now we’ll keep the existing back-end though it might not be the favorable in the long term but what it’s all about now is to get something out, something that’s stable, rather than something that’s perfect and built on the right platform.
A new version (2.0) of the back-end was today deployed to beta.ambadoo.com with a fully working Facebook Connect, done the right way. We’ll get the iPhone & Web App compatible with the new authentication by the end of this week so we can start the real tests of creating & verifying users, for real this time around.
