I've been spending some quality time getting MouseZoom into some kind of usable state. By usable, I mean Walt can download the source, build it and begin styling it. While I've been doing a ton of work, it just isn't quite there because I'm working on a library that the project references that isn't in the same source repository. I'm getting closer, but it's not quite there.
It's been a love-hate kind of project, because of the forums. I mean, the forums are actually fine in that they're a known quantity, they work and there's no surprise around that. On the other hand, I'm trying to shoehorn them into what's otherwise an ASP.NET MVC project. Putting Webforms crap in MVC suX0rz. That means I'm getting the benefit of MVC in terms of less code, clean markup, easy AJAXy goodness, etc., but I've had to sacrifice testability and sanity, particularly as it relates to the master page. Turns out you can't do MVC-ish stuff when the same master is being used by a Webforms page. You can do the reverse (that's the situation at work), but not the other way.
So while that did slow me down, otherwise I'm pretty excited about how quickly stuff is coming along. Part of that is because the world has changed enough to make it so easy. I mean, we've got drag-and-drop photo ordering, something I'd never spend a ton of time on since it's just for us maintaining the site, because it takes so little work to use jQuery.
The other thing that helps is that so much of this is reused stuff. I'm basically working off of libraries that have been around for a long time. The bad side of that is they're tightly coupled and not that well written, with code dating back at least six years, but otherwise it's "free" and I don't have to mess with it. I just hate that I can't use the skills I have now to make it super testable and bullet proof without huge rewrites. But that's a positive, too, that I've resisted the temptation to rewrite something for the millionth time.
Some day I'll have the time and desire to rewrite the forum app. I actually started a little project just to practice doing things "right" before I interviewed, since I didn't feel like I had enough experience in the test-driven world. All things considered, that effort went surprisingly well, and very fast. It's already about 500 lines of code, about half of that test code.
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