Fall 2007

• Meet our deliverables goals for tomorrow's deadline.
• Consult and work through the access control, notifications and messaging specifications.
• Collaborate with Hubert to implement the access control system.
• Begin implementation of the notifications system, particularly to verify that key technical components of the system will work.
• Shift our atmosphere to focus on big-picture quality, so that we take ownership of making sure our results are usable.

Of these I believe that I've completed most of each of them (with the percentage complete above based on an uneven weighting of the priorities of these points). Here's a description of what has been completed:

• While it's about 18 hours to early to say if we will truly meet our deliverables goal, I'm extremely confident we can do it. Last night the site was operational with but minor issues, and  I believe we'll have a useable functional site up tomorrow. In fact, it will have a few features I didn't expect, including background search indexing and image tagging.
• Hubert, Dave and I (and less so myself actually lately) have been working through the issues in the access control, and Hubert has made some strides towards implementing it. I believe it will be operational within a week or so. The notifications system design document is nearly complete, but still needs review (and I still have to find someone to own this system). The messaging specification is little more than a powerpoint explaining at a high-level how the system will work, although that's actually probably enough for someone to implement it, but the feature has basically been pushed back to later deliverables, so it's a little off the radar.
• Hubert has taken over the access control work fairly well. It's not moving as quickly as I'd hoped (I'd actually hoped it might be working tomorrow as recently as about 4 days ago). It's good to see him take ownership of it.
• I've been working through a prototype/skeleton of the notifications system, which is actually becoming fairly complete. There are still a lot of unhandled cases and work to be done in crafting all of the scenarios, but I've been working through the worrisome technical issues. The only one left is to ensure that I can connect to an SMTP relay, which I hope to get completed tonight. Other than that, the double-visitor system and SQL based queue seem to be working, although I encountered some hiccups in object serialization (XML serialization can't serialize interfaces so I had to switch to using a BinaryFormatter).
• I've done a lot on this front. I think a lot of this has happened because of trac coming online, but essentially I've been assigning bugs for things that don't work. In general I can sense a real shift in the individual responsibility toward tracking down and fixing bugs that affect usability. In addition, Sohum has really ramped it up in streamlining the user interaction with the site.

There are a few caveats:

• Luke had wanted a payment system for the demo. I think we were rather ambivalent about it, but I don't see any chance of it getting in the project (Hubert simply hasn't finished the necessary access control stuff which it's dependent on). This MUST happen this week.
• The messaging system design document needs to be expanded. Also I should update the access control design document to reflect the changes in design made by Dave and Hubert.
• I need to work to ramp up our progress rate on this. It is not good that the access control isn't functional even in minimal form yet.
• Notifiations should be handed off very soon to someone who can own it.
• Actually I don't think there are caveats to this one, except that in the mix, I think we may have lost some off the concretenes of "milestones", etc. I agree that you have shifted to big-picture; I also think milestones have slid a bit more out of control than you're letting on here. --Chelsea