found drama

I’m on a webdev team and there’s some kind of 3rd party slideshow app that needs to get plugged into the right-hand sidebar. Their API has a lot of neat hooks — really comprehensive stuff — but it has some of the poorest documentation we’ve ever seen. The launch deadline for the site is fast approaching and so we cobble together this brute force method. It seems to work but it’s slower than we want — and not SEO-friendly at all. I get into a fight with one of the other developers about how to do it. At the heart of the argument? We both agree that the method slated for deployment sucks. But he’d rather not deploy it at all, miss the deadline (or deliver an incomplete product) than revise it later. But neither of us can propose a good alternative or solution to the problem.

Well, that’s not entirely true. We know another way. It just needs ten hours of work a piece. And/or rearchitecting the widget system.

About Rob Friesel