Day 37

I apologize for being late, last night I got caught up in my Sociology hw and I completely forgot to blog. Yesterday we committed out work for the completed feature, and it got deployed in the real site. Pretty cool how fast we were able to add a new feature, and then see it already in place on their website. We actually got the feature done so fast that they just weren't ready for it, which I believe is what Micah was aiming for. Suddenly this thing that they thought would take a couple of weeks to finish was done in three days, and they were completely surprised.

This of course was the good sort of surprise, and they quite quickly brought in one of the people who would be using the feature often so that they could see how it would work. Unfortunately I had to go to class right as Micah was demoing it, but it went well and apparently they were so impressed that they included it in their deployment right away!

The client does continuous deployment, and each week they push up to the main server, so every time anyone commits code they have to make sure everything still works. It seems kind of scary, since you could potentially deploy a secretly bugged build up to the live site, but of course you can always roll back if that turns out to be the case. It does, however, let them very rapidly develop their site and there is always something new for people use and take advantage of.

Some interesting things I had never though of occurred when we were setting up the error messages that the user might see. First off, since typically the business logic belongs in the models, we wanted to be passing the error message from the model through the controller. The client had, however, been using generic error messages located in the controller. If some request failed, they would check to see if the model had populated an object with any error messages, and if there was one, they would print out a generic. We wanted to print out a more informative and meaningful error, but here is the rub - if you are making an international app, you want to have as few error messages and such as you can so that translating all of them is a straight forward process.