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Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 8:54 pm
by alex.barylski
Just a quick poll...where do you do think most of your time is spent during a regular day?

If it's "other" please state what (ie: planning/design/refactoring/documenting)

Also if you could include the percentage of time you think is spent on this given activity that would be nice too. :)

Maybe you should mention whether your working on legacy code, existing application or actively developed (in alpha still).

Cheers,
Alex

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 9:02 pm
by Chris Corbyn
I tend to spend very little time fixing bugs, mostly due to the way we work (TDD). Most of my time is spent changing exisintg features to do different things, or adding new features entirely. I spend a small amount of time in meetings, reading around online for new ideas/approaches to problems we've tackled - sometimes that leads to a couple of days trying something new even if it gets scrapped.

Just recently I made the shift from lucene/solr to sphinx for fulltext searching and had to spend some time researching it, playing around with it, and deciding how best to integrate it with our running system. That took a couple of days, but it paid off because our system is now a lot faster when it comes to reindexing our data, and we have some amazing search capabilities integrated with our MySQL database.

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 10:21 pm
by alex.barylski
This is all while working at sitepoint?

This is probably a benefit of working on a hosted software system, or do they offer bespoke development?

I have had the "pleasure" of working in both software factories and hosted environments, and the latter is far less troublesome.

When you have thousands or millions of people using your products on their own servers, bugs are IMHO far more likely, as you will surely miss a configuration hack for Linux or Windows, or even Redhat or Debian.

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 12:18 am
by Chris Corbyn
PCSpectra wrote:This is all while working at sitepoint?
Yes. I have to admit, my last job was not quite the same. I wasn't able to develop using the methodologies I prefer, and I was not able to spend time (without getting earache) doing obvious things like refactoring.
PCSpectra wrote:This is probably a benefit of working on a hosted software system, or do they offer bespoke development?
The company is split into three main division... Books & Publishing: Our articles and books; The Doghouse: sitepoint.com itself, SitePoint Marketplace and a few other smaller in-house projects; SitePoint Solutions: our client-facing division.

So yes, we do provide services to clients, and we still work in the same way. It's a selling point for many clients really! Fortunately we're *usually* working with large companies rather than smaller companies on lower budgets, though we have some small clients.

However, I work only for the doghouse (mostly the SitePoint Marketplace, and also aspects of sitepoint.com, such as the eCommerce system).
PCSpectra wrote:I have had the "pleasure" of working in both software factories and hosted environments, and the latter is far less troublesome.

When you have thousands or millions of people using your products on their own servers, bugs are IMHO far more likely, as you will surely miss a configuration hack for Linux or Windows, or even Redhat or Debian.
We have some clients who choose the maintain their own servers, but the majority prefer that we handle that. We run on clouds and have expertise in managing such a setup with little ongoing maintenance requirements.

Always worth keeping an eye out on the jobs page :) We do take international employees and offer sponsorship when needed.

http://www.sitepoint.com/about/jobs/

EDIT | The 99designs job on the jobs page is for 99designs.com which started out as a project run by SitePoint. I worked on that team for my first 4 months at SitePoint, before they spun it off into a sister company. The manager is the same, the owner is the same, the office is shared, and the ethics are the same.

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 1:14 am
by SteveC
Most of my time is spent perfecting what I've coded.

I don't spend nearly enough time making headway/progress, and I never spend time documenting. :crazy:

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 1:16 am
by alex.barylski
The Doghouse: sitepoint.com itself
Hahaha...why is called the doghouse, may I ask? :)

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 2:30 am
by Chris Corbyn
PCSpectra wrote:
The Doghouse: sitepoint.com itself
Hahaha...why is called the doghouse, may I ask? :)
It's just a way of calling us the workers really. Not supposed to be very serious :P

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 2:33 am
by alex.barylski
I see...curious but what do they pay you? PM if you can't mention on the boards or ignore me outright if you can't or wish not to disclose those details. :P I'll understand :)

I worked for a company in Oz while living here in Canada, while the dollar isn't great, the pay was rather minimal, in comparison to some ads I've seen for US positions, it's insane.

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 5:59 am
by Chris Corbyn
I do ok for myself, but yeah I'd rather not share my salary details. It's below $100K (AUD). We all earn different amounts within the company and wages are reviewed based on KPI's.

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 6:03 am
by jmut
Well I guess with such poll people that hit refresh 80%(to test) of time spent implementing new feature will consider it impelmenting new feature while this really is F5-ing

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 7:00 am
by Eran
This poll is a little weird - is fixing bugs really different than technical support? I would consider one a part of the other. I would add options such as "refactoring", "writing tests", "reimplementing old features" and so forth.

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 11:54 am
by alex.barylski
I do ok for myself, but yeah I'd rather not share my salary details. It's below $100K (AUD). We all earn different amounts within the company and wages are reviewed based on KPI's
Fare enough. When I worked for the company in Oz I was less than half of 100K CDN/year...so I was curious to know what SitePoint might pay a salaried employee.
is fixing bugs really different than technical support?
Depends on the organization I suppose. Personally I consider answering emails and troubleshooting and actually validating bugs, entering them into a ticket issue management system quite different from "fixing" bugs. Usually in most companies, tech support is where they start you off where your new to a project, it gives a immediate idea as to the bugs you are going to address, etc.
I would consider one a part of the other
Depends on the organization I guess...it's never been that way for me.
I would add options such as "refactoring", "writing tests", "reimplementing old features" and so forth.
This poll is a little weird - is fixing bugs really different than technical support? I would consider one a part of the other. I would add options such as "refactoring", "writing tests", "reimplementing old features" and so forth.
I mention that didn't I? Obviously a poll cannot ever cover all grounds...the three I mentioned are pretty much universal though...generic enough to encompass the whole nine yards.

While writing unit tests is not exactly adding features...you are in essence preparing to deliver money code...whereas technical support is mostly time dedicated to the customer and bug fixing is usually what the "dog house" is in my experience.

Most people hate fixing bugs...they'd rather write code not work on others bad decisions...which is why I chuckled and asked Chris what he meant when he said "dog house"

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 12:00 pm
by Eran
Where do you put refactoring then? it's definitely not a part of any of the points you mentioned, and I consider it definitely higher than bug-fixing (for me that is).

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 12:12 pm
by alex.barylski
Refactoring lies in middle earth. :P

If were to classify it under the three given above...I would probably lean towards bug fixing as the end result of refactoring is making code "better" and the opposite of "better" is usually "bad" and bugs are rarely seen as a "good" thing. :)

It is so cold here right now...my fingers are freezing and I can barely type....Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Re: Where is most of your time spent

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 7:42 pm
by jack_indigo
1. Reddit. Know any good Reddit detox treatment centers? Please help me! Actually, the problem is that I'm a very boring person to my wife and kids if I don't tell them something I read on the Internet or in the news.

2. Fighting with CSS.

3. My designer should be doing this, but he's busy doing other stuff and he only did the main pages. I'm left having to do the other pages. So, I'm positioning the elements on pages in an intuitive manner that doesn't confuse the end user, looks the best it possibly can, and getting the XHTML and CSS just right. Sometimes I have to throw in an IE6 behavior trick or use jQuery. And then I have to go back and forth with my designer on how this all should look until we finally get it. And this sucks tremendous time.

4. And then that leaves code. I can fix bugs pretty fast, but it's the workflow decisions that suck time. You'll want an example for that, I'm sure. So, I mean....you get to a dashboard page on the site, you click New Listing, it determines you didn't pay, makes you pay, then takes you to a form, but then gives you a preview option, and then uses AJAX to validate the form fields, and needs to show a busy indicator while that's running, and needs a timeout, and then the form posts, and then you need a thank you page, and then if they refresh any of the pages, you don't need the record going in twice, and then it needs a link to return back to the dashboard. It then needs to be intuitive, and worded properly, and that comes to problem # 3 for me (above). All of this is what I call "workflow", and sometimes the functional specs aren't clear enough to define all workflows, and you have these discoveries that are unavoidable, unfortunately, and have to sit down with the designer and the client (or project manager) to iron out the best way to work this out in the most intuitive way but yet not affect system performance or make this a huge ordeal unless absolutely necessary.

5. And then is just mule-work -- the keystrokes required to build all the features requested by the clients. I get clients who ask me to implement a lot of features, and there's a lot of AJAX and jQuery involved in those features as well. Most of the time I'm pretty good with that by now, so it's just mule work.

6. And this next one only applies at the start of each new project -- the back and forth discussion about the functional spec, drawing wireframes, etc.