Kristopher Tate is still working on the new release of Zooomr, and in a sure sign that it's not coming soon, he released a video of their enhanced lightbox feature in this blog entry. Zooomr shut down their website on March 13th in hopes of launching their new release within 2 days, but decided to rollback to the old release on March 18th, after experiencing difficulties with the new version. Releasing news on upcoming features is normally a good thing, but in this case, it's a sign that the release may not come for a while.
You've got to feel for Kristopher. Having built Zooomr on his own, he's undoubtedly exceptionally talented. However, as with any other major project, it really helps having a second qualified opinion in the room. This makes me think back to the old days of iStockphoto: I was extremely skeptical when our VP of Software Development introduced pair programming and other extreme programming methodologies to iStockphoto a few years back. By pairing up two programmers to do one task, the methodology was supposed to allow for knowledge transfer and reduce the number of errors in the code. I immediately thought that our productivity would drop in half, but that never happened. I think our developers ended up being happier with their jobs because it allowed them to learn more and learn faster. We often treat developers as if they should be in a dark room programming all day, and forget that they would benefit from working on team projects as well.
I think the biggest benefit of pair programming was the amount of thought that went into a project before coding started. Because two minds never think exactly alike, this essentially forced a discussion regarding methodology and structure, and issues were brought up before they committed anything to code. iStockphoto has some super-talented developers - and this only made them even better. Maybe it's time for Kristopher to find a partner?
Patrick, pair programming a great idea. Not for everyone though.
ReplyDeleteWe typically build a team of two UI specialists with a programmer- it creates a different outcome. Building a scalable infrastructure is important- building a usable site is even more important. If you don't think about future additions the UI can quickly look like a garage sale. Sometimes the most elegant programming solution is to not code it. :)