Well, my current projects at work are a far cry from last year’s mission critical projects where I was on the edge of my seat, tapping my feet to the sound of inaudible rhythm, staring at the screen with unblinking eyes, gritting my teeth as I developed applications in an almost mechanical manner.
Now, I find myself carving up new designs for ancient projects and looking at the code base, I’m honestly surprised that it has managed to not only run, but make bank for the company it belonged to all these years. Caching really does save your ass, so does having a dedicated server you can pump hardware into.
In the past few weeks, I’ve carved up designs, chased several phantom display bugs (which ended up being typos – you would’ve known if you had been keeping up with my tweets) and went back to coding ASP like it was 1999.
Yes you read right, ASP! I’m currently trapped in legacy code world… negotiating screen real estate and dealing with browser laws and rules that change ever so slightly for each different version of browser software!
Surprisingly, I’m still an epic ASP classic coder. After shaking off some rust, I’ve implemented good old option explicit, eliminated all the “on error resume next” one liners scattered throughout the source code, controlled and centralised the numerous global ADODB Connection and Recordset objects which get shared by different parts of the code… in short I’ve started makin’ the move to make the codebase a little more meaningful.
We opted to go with this option due to time constraints and other plans I’ve got down the track. Needless to say, I’m single handedly taking care of business and by the time I finish, this mission critical website is going to:
- Perform better - I’ve sped up the site by lessening the newbie load cerated by having several Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Connection”) calls, to use just the one.
- Be easier to navigate - At the present moment, the current version of the website I’m workin’ on has 5 different navigation systems with links that point to the same pages but are named differently. I’ve changed this so that the links are meaningful. Related navigation items are grouped together.
- Consistent content layout – Well, as consistent as possible anyway – there are different heading layouts and a lack of consistency in the current site. The new design has design consistency goodness all over it, but due to the html being deeply mixed up with ASP (we’re talking 3000 – 4000 line scripts here) and the time line I’m working with, I really can’t afford to nit pick html. I’m going for a happy middle here.
- Have a complete Member’s Control Panel – The website is going to have a Control Panel that works like a control panel rather than a password protected page with a bunch of links with useless info.
All in all, I’m excited about the end product which comes closer as each productive day is complete! What happens from that point is currently being idly, but meticulously planned for. Very exciting times ahead, this should be great!
rob
Bill Karwin
Kevin
James Horne
Martin
Jani Hartikainen
Villar
Walter
David Penner
Diah
