Quote:
Originally Posted by Cristiano  Change is fine, but good lord, they can at least announce it. Am I ranting here for nothing and just totally missed it? |
I don't think many quite grasp just how dysfunctional their operations are. I can only claim experience as in a former life part of my work was to go into software projects in that state of disarray and make them work.
As I'm sure you've noticed, they've never had technical writers; there has never been any documentation. Any number of releases demonstrate that they have no revision control. I don't mean they don't have a revision control system - code control is easy - I mean that no one has any idea what comprises what build, what deltas will work correctly with each other and which won't. At present there are at least 4 versions of the windows client, all which contain disjoint subsets of the code base. How can they have release notes that are just plain wrong? How can they roll out builds only to rescind them within the hour? Because there is no gatekeeper, there is no librarian. All of the difficult, tedious work involved in making sure that you can recreate yesterday's build today is not present because no one ever really knew what made today's build.
As you have seen, it is no longer cute. Perhaps they changed their format to conform to flickr's desires and literally no one understood the implication it would have upon snapzilla. Maybe they just changed it because someone needed to show that they did something last week and their boss can't discriminate between useful effort and "pushing papers" around the desk. Yes, I've had to reform pathological development teams in the past, but I'd never encountered anything nearly as bad as this.
From the new format you posted, perhaps you should be glad that a regexp can discriminate between old and new and that another can parse the new form. My guess is that if you could interview all the staff there, perhaps two knew that the change was made, one knew why, and another had any idea it would bork snapzilla yet - of course - wasn't aware that the change was being made.
This same sort of
was why I stopped coding at release 1.3 as it broke about 3/4 of the code I'd written to that point, with no warning whatsoever.
