I heard someone use the term "tactical refactoring" today at work. It might be the most ridiculous term I've ever heard in software engineering circles, like it was made to annoy program managers. Imagine my delight and annoyance around that, given my work history.
In any case, I've come to realize that the work I'm not finishing fast enough on POP Forums is exactly that. For v9.1, I'm having to refactor enough of the code to enable the extensibility used heavily on CoasterBuzz. I need to finish that before I can actually start hacking at the next version of the site. The reason is pretty simple: The forums interact with the news, trip reports and the "day in pictures" forum.
Of course, that means I need to re-do that photo app so that it works for the new architecture, and that's the part that's taking too long. As it turns out, I was not quite as abstract about it as I should have been, so I've only been able to recycle bits and pieces.
In an ideal world, I'll have that stuff done by the time we move. In the real world, who knows. At the end of September, I officially put CoasterBuzz on the "stale" list, as it will have been three years since the last re-do. Three years! That's how long the previous version hung out too. I have some fresh ideas in my head, probably because I've spent enough time doing PM work now that I'm thinking in additional ways that I wouldn't have strictly doing dev work. It excites me, but I have to buckle down and commit.
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