Lost in LoC

This past week my team and I worked on version 8 (Oxygen) of MashedIn. We had 2 goals going into this version:

• Provide a better, more predictable user experience when authenticating with the product
• Do a better job at handling badness when talking with Facebook, Twitter, and other social partners
• Fix bugs!

It never ceases to amaze me how much our team can accomplish in as little as 3 days of development time. Here’s the fifty thousand foot view.

• 4 improvements to how we authenticate and manage sessions with our social partners
• Bunch of preliminary branding work. Pretty pictures! Human readable copy! Personality provided by cheeze wiz!
• 13 bug fixes
• 8 bagels eaten
• Several dozen carafes of coffee confidently consumed

Now, that may not sound like too much, but that’s a full 3 days of work across a team of 4 developers, including design meetings, decision making, and the occasional head butting. I believe we tackled some good things this sprint, and the experience we provide to the user is a little more predictable; we shouldn’t be shattering your expectations anymore.

There were 2 main challenges we faced in Oxygen. First, the more we investigated how to better manage expectations for the user (that is, not shock and awe the user with unexpected, crappy behaviour) the more subtleties we discovered. Most of these subtleties came in the form of Facebook Connect. Managing your sessions can be quite difficult thanks to the persistently authenticated nature of Facebook Connect (and the fact that we don’t control any of it). What happens when I sign into Facebook using an alternative set of credentials, but then I visit MashedIn and MashedIn determines that I have a different Facebook user associated with my account than what Facebook Connect dictates? What’s the best way to handle this? How transparent do we need to be to the user? Do we really want to provide a bunch of subtle options? Are those options going to frustrate the users? It’s a tough call, and we believe we’ve made the right decisions, but a good round of user testing will definitely help us out.

The 2nd challenge was one of irony: Facebook has been biting the proverbial dust all week. Without Facebook we can’t grab social information for the visitor. Without social information we can’t effectively perform what we want our product to do. Without doing what we want to do in the app we’re wasting the time of our users by providing them crap all for value. With Facebook crapping out this week, we were able to uncover a lot of really poorly written code. We were able to eat our own dog food, and it tasted like… well, dog food. It sucked. We all went crazy. Brett, one of our developers, started wearing a monkey suit to work. It was total chaos. As a result, we addressed a bunch of the Rainy Day scenarios and made our dog food taste more like a bottle of cheap wine. While what is there isn’t perfect, we believe the overall quality of both the code and the user experience is better. One week at a time, my friends, one week at a time.

Next week we start our 9th sprint. If you’re a chemistry buff you’ll know that Fluorine has an atomic weight of 9. You’ll also know that Fluorine is an extremely toxic element, one that may cause severe burns when it comes in contact with the skin. As such I think it’s fitting that we’re attempting to accomplish a lot of painful things in Fluorine. We have 2 goals for next week:

• Fail faster! By that I mean improve performance by not allowing several retries that ultimately result in failure. Fail hard, and fail now! (Note: we’ll be doing lots of other things to improve performance… embracing failure is just one of them)
• Make it pretty! We’ve spent a lot of time during Nitrogen and Oxygen gearing up our look and feel, branding, etc. Now we want to start pulling the trigger on those ideas.

Next week should be interesting and pose a lot of new challenges. I’m expecting that by the end of Fluorine we’ll have a better performing, better looking product. One that will hopefully make you smile and bring a tear to your eye. So keep checking back, and make sure to go give MashedIn a spin and let us know what you think (good, bad, terrible, fantastic – all feedback is welcome)!.

Until then, The Dude abides.