Delay your decisions

I design very little upfront. Sometimes I need to make an estimation, I design a little more. Sometimes the project is hardly specced and there is a lot of exploring to do.

In this post I would like to give a demonstration of how a recent project developed.

Initial stage

> Client: “We want a fancier frontend for our data”.
> Me: “Sure, any limitations?”
> Client: “We give you 4 months”
> Me: “Can I use any tech I want?”
> Client: “Na, we want to be able to continue on what you’re going to create, so please use P, X, Y and/or Z.”
> Me: “Sure, P is not my favourite, but some time ago I’ve dealt with it, so ok, we keep it simple anyway.”

The plan that followed:

Initially I thought I could fancy up the CSS, but the old product was in a very bad state and not really maintainable. So I decided to create a thin API layer in P (yes of PHP), a modern front-end layer in JavaScript using a framework that I co-introduced in the organisation a few years ago (R…

[Project] Introducing PortableRails3

The InstantRails project is outdated and contains just too much IMHO ( Apache, PHP, who needs that when searching for Rails?). Other options to get Rails running require an installer (RailsInstaller or RubyInstaller )… and in some environments ( limited access accounts ) installing is not an option. And in yet other environments, you'd, well I'd, rather have a command line option, instead of an in-your-face installer that requires end-users to press 'next', 'next', 'next'…So that's why I created Portable Rails 3. It's name was 'inspired' (it's a boring name, I know) by the thoughtfully named Portable Git which makes an excelent companion.Installing is as simple as extracting (or cloning) and running start-cmd.batCreditsI didn't do much besides just throwing the binary stuff together. Stuff that went into the mix (I'll update when I feel its necessary):Ruby 1.9.2PDCurses [1]GDBM  [1]OpenSSL [1]readline [1]Zlib  [1]IconV [1]RubyGems 1.7.2 (updated with update –system )R…