Forever a Balancing Act

It amazes me how many times an organization has to adjust itself in order to stay in alignment. Business needs seem to change rapidly and seemingly hit both sides of the pendulum. On one side, features rein king. Without this particular feature, x is not possible. On the other side, Customer Support needs better documentation, more responsiveness to customer feedback, etc. With limited resources, decisions have to be made as to which feature or task wins.

Now comes the agile part. A commandment which states all else takes a back seat. However, without this ability to alter course rapidly, certain business opportunities are lost or severly delayed. I don't believe in forever shifting tasks to accomodate potential business opportunities, but some opportunities need to be taken advantage of or the business suffers overall.

This is where we have found ourselves over the last few weeks (task prioritization). I've been watching the business side (specifically Anthony Nettuno our COO) and I'm glad to say things are going well. Nothing is without its problems, but if everything was easy none of us would have jobs.

Javascript Compilation?

I've been messing around with some reflection methods to accommodate more dynamic communication between javascript and web services. The web services do more of a pass through to a DAL/BAL layer for further processing. In order to do some server side help for our javascript / EdgeML (form markup) to work, we are attempting a semi-compiler style approach to lessen the blow on the client system. Meaning, we have integrated some server tags in our EdgeML to reduce web service calls later.

This only works for items that are more static since we cache several bits, but no one can complain when we can reduce the number of web service calls in half. Overall, it's a very fun and interesting implementation. Sometimes it even feels like we are near the cutting edge ;)