Now blogging at diego's weblog. See you over there!

Russ has commented on my entry yesterday about data structure evolution/migration. He said:

I admire your dedication, and think it's great, but I just wanted to point out that your code is plainly marked alpha. Don't waste time doing something that's not going to be useful later. If you make a huge switch in the DB, your users should know that's the price of being on the cutting edge.

:-)

-Russ

It's true. And in part I ended up doing the change because I saw that this could be a problem in the future. Specifically regarding spaces, I had to do this (even though I didn't realize it at the beginning) simply to understand better the issues I was talking about in the entry. Now I understand much better the tradeoffs involved and even though it might not mean that there won't be any problems at all through the rest of the alpha cycle, it will certainly mean that I'll be much better prepared for the beta/final release, when this behavior will be expected (at least by me). So this work will definitely be useful later.

Apart from that, it might be that I'm making things too hard on myself (nothing new there), but I really prefer to give a good experience even if it's an alpha version. It can fail, yes, but I'll try to do what everything I can to make it painless.

By the way, thanks, Russ, for the nice comment. Sometimes it's not so easy to keep going (specially when I think about the hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of people that MS puts into the development of outlook) and encouragement like this always helps. :-)

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on January 5 2003 at 1:11 PM