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Sailing Out of Harbour

Ship sailing out of Toronto Harbour
Photo by Mary Alton

Well… the new developsense.com site has been up for a week, and it seems stable. Time for an actual post.

First: this site is now modern-looking and responsive. There are some nice new features (including a catalog of videos), and many more to come. I think it all looks great, and the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. That’s really down to one person.

This site (along with the Rapid Software Testing site and James Bach’s satisfice.com) would not exist as they are with the determination, patience, and skill of Mary Alton, my wife, partner, graphic designer, WordPress wrangler—and, when it comes to me and James, cat-herder. And that is highly incomplete list of attributes. I am, and we are, deeply, deeply grateful. Thank you, Mary.

What’s most remarkable about Mary’s work is that there have been so few bugs reported with respect to the look, feel, and functionality of the site. Such bugs as there might be come from dealing with old stuff and new stuff; and tension between the power afforded by certain plugins and frameworks, and their occasional inflexibility. This leads to a set of meditations on software quality — which is never about Platonic purity and always about tradeoffs — that I hope to write about in upcoming posts.

Thank you to pre-release testers James Bach and Ariel Bolton, who scoured the site for problems, and whose reports allowed us to address them. Thank you also to Pablo Garcia and attendees of the one-day SIGIST Sweden conference in Stockholm — especially Wilhelm Lund and Ronny Svedman — who got a sneak peak a couple of days before we pushed the Big Red Button.

Thank you to the people who have been gently and patiently complaining for years about the archaic appearance of the old site. Your long wait is at an end.

Thank you to the town of Ennis, Ireland, where we spent our days doing focused work on the site and our evenings sitting in with some of the best Irish traditional music players in the world. (In fairness, as they say, the afternoons were often more productive than the mornings were.)

Thank you also to the testers who have provided problem reports on the live site so far: Bas (That Martial Arts Guy on Twitter) (who reported the first bug we didn’t know about); Eugene Elizondo; Kees Overduin (who reported the first really critical bug without a workaround); Mirza Sisic; Annette Brown; Mike Vaida; Marianne Øster. I hope I haven’t missed anyone. To all, we take every report seriously, and we’ll do what we can to make things work better for you.

There’s a big backlog — backblog — of posts in the pipeline. Stand by.

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