On the whole, it has been an honor to try to fill your shoes. I am doing my best to carry on some of the better ideas you’ve initiated, and am hard at work trying to undo some of the stupidist fucking ideas I’ve ever seen.
Like making the left navigation menu flash-based. I’ve already had to stick in a fix so IE losers don’t have to click once on the damn thing before it will even fucking work. Soon, it will be gone, replaced with a very simple DHTML menu that can be modified and tested without a PhD in archaeology.
Yes, archaeology.
Trotting the timelines to find the exact bit of (uncommented, undocumented) ActionScript I need to change, then digging six levels deep into nested movie clips, then deciphering even more ActionScript that tells me to go… fucking where??? If I need to make a slight tweak to the way your left menu works, I guess I have to dig up Troy, decipher its alphabet, and make the correct inferences about its customs first.
Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy figuring shit out and if I hadn’t been under deadline pressure to fix your bug, this would have been fun. Well, not really. With all the sixty million simple and effective ways to do this, congratulations on finding the most complicated, inflexible, fucking stupidest way. I hope where you are now, where you’re using a budget the size of NASA’s to build a better mouse trap (undoubtedly using Flash, because wood and wire are just not the best ways to demonstrate your expertise), I hope there’s nobody else who will have to work with your code.
Sometimes you use what you got, ya know? I sometimes feel programmers operate as the Wizard. Since normal humans can’t communicate with them, they are free to do on the back end whatever they want, as long as it looks good on the front end.
As much as I miss the days when I was a card-carrying geek, I don’t miss days like the ones you have had.
mhendo and Troy McClure SF - You are preaching to the choir here. I think if you need to show a video, Flash is the best option. If you’re doing something interactive, Flash might be the way to go. For anything else, please fer the love of Og and all that is holier than His Socks… use something else. If tempted to use Flash anyway, please consider a career in housepainting or door-to-door sales or anything but web development.
My site is built almost entirely out of little Flash pieces. I’ve been spending an enormous amount of time switching out the parts that could be HTML (which is almost all of it).
friedo, good to know the Trojan alphabet has been hashed out. This may be why, on the whole, working with this guy’s ActionScript has been getting easier lately (but actually that’s probably because more and more of it is getting replaced with mine). Actually, I almost hope my predecessor is stuck with working with other people this time, because by now his charm would have worn very thin with his colleagues indeed. But oh well. Soon it won’t be my problem.
Yeah. (As far as I know, anyway. I’m no ancient Greek linguistics buff.) You should have pulled out some cool Doper-like obscure reference like Linear A.
Godalmighty. You’ve got my sympathy. Also, there’s a circle of hell reserved for predecessors who didn’t comment their code. The worst part about a situation like this, though, is explaining to the management types who fund the projects why it’s necessary to change something that’s “working.” Uh…because if you let me redo it the right way all these updates you’re asking for won’t each take me a freaking week to finish? Every day I’m thankful for current job: websites from scratch, no messing with horrible code, reasonable boss. cue chorus of angels
I understand the appeal of Flash. You’ve got control over colors, placement, font, timing of animations, and some designers are freaked out by the lack of control you have in web design. But they really need to learn how to do their job. If you want to create something amazing and groundbreaking and artistic and push the envelope, sure, play with Flash. But if you’re making a website people have to use, for god’s sake, make it usable. They wouldn’t approach a newspaper and an artistic coffee table book the same way–so why can’t they translate that to websites? Incompetence.
It could also stem from what I like to call Angry Designer Syndrome. You know, that guy who’s pissed because he discovered he’s got to work with people and the work he’s doing has a practical purpose? He wishes he was starving in a NYC loft, wearing an old shirt covered in oil paint and turpentine. After working with him for a week, so do I. People like that must have things their way and are never wrong. I’ve been in situations where if I had to listen to my coworker bitch about how their artistic vision was being compromised one more time I would have grabbed them by the shoulders and yelled, “You are SELLING TCHOTCHKES! It is not the END OF THE WORLD! Just MOVE the damn heading to the left and STOP BITCHING!”