So yesterday, I ran into our drupal project manager, Michal Minecki, at the LA Drupal Camp. So far I am really happy with the work Michal and our Ciplex team has been doing. After the Drupal sessions, Mike and I went to a coffee shop to review the designs and technical spec, and discovered a near miscommunication. I don't think this would have been caught quite so quickly- if at all - had we not met in person. bonus points for the real world.

Here is what happened:

Earlier this week, on Monday, I met with our project manager Mike, and we reviewed a 40 some page technical document that he had prepared, detailing everything we will be creating. 

The technical document, in effect, took the designs I had made, and overlapped the functionality detailed on the spreadsheet I had put together. Basically, matching every design element with a text description of the way it should work.

Afte a long meeting, I spent the rest of the evening making notes using Adobe Acrobat to insert my notes into the PDF, and also adding comments in little virtual stickits. Mike was talking with the programming team (in Serbia) the next morning, to review everything, so I had to get everything in by midnight.

After a long day, I sent off the notes. All seemed to go well, and Mike sent me the revised tech spec, which I needed to review and approve. I gave it a quick glance and noticed a lot of my notes had not made it into the final draft, but that others had, and had been labelled either - "to do now" - "to do if possible" - or "out of scope" depending on whether they fell within the scope of our contract, on the edge, or outside.

However, a lot of my notes hadn't made it in. I assumed these things were out of scope, but needed to review the edited draft i made with the final revised version. I was not looking forward to this, and kept putting it off. When Michal and I ran into each other at the Drupal Camp, we decided to go over it in person.

I showed him the editied version marked up on my desktop, and he was surprised to see all the inserted notes, which had not shown up on his machine. Turns out, he had only been able to see the stick it comments- which explains why some of the notes didn't make it into the final doc. 

Anyway, problem found and solved. There are so many little turns to slow things down or to get off track. Sometimes, being able to meet in person and hammer things out really helps to reduce the chances of miscommunication. Makes you wonder what little things go unnoticed as our world becomes increasingly reliant on the virtual.

Anyway, I'm really excited about how the web development is going. I've been working a ton this week on designs for the new signup page and profile setup. Really focusing on making things simple.

Today I'm headed back to LA Drupal Camp, there is a session this morning about using Drupal for Designing Collaborative Communities that I'm really looking forward to. 

Drupal Camp is free, and downtown in the convention center, so I can ride my bike, which is pretty cool.

I'll post some of the design work I've been doing this week.

best to all,

n