Ionrock Dot Org

Last week I went to Huntsville, AL to do some training for a client. It went pretty well overall. In an effort to enjoy myself more when traveling for business, I made a commitment to try to eat well. I had a pretty cruddy steak at TGI Fridays, but the two beers that went along with it made up for bad food. The next night I went to the restaurant next door to the hotel. It mentioned something about "lonestar" in the name, so I figured it had to be awesome. Unfortunately, those folks who try to market to Texans don't feel the need to actually research what Texans actually enjoy. The result was YACS (Yet Another Cruddy Steak) and the worst "Texas" steak sauce I have ever had (produced in New Jersey no less). Less than amazing meals aside, the trip wasn't so bad, and even in the midst of my mediocre dinners, I found that I was enjoying myself.

The actual work portion of the trip went pretty well overall. The training sped by pretty quickly and the trainees were very interactive. I did learn a good deal about Frame, which is very good. There was one trainee who was not actually an employee, but a contractor for internationalization. He was a nice guy and knew a lot about Frame, although I kept getting the impression that he was trying to sway them from using ePublisher in a way. It was a strange situation because they were very happy with the product and what it could do, while at the same time wanting to find some other solution or not get locked in. All and all though, I think I made it clear that we try to provide an open solution that is meant to meet needs and not lock people into bad systems.

The worst thing about the trip was running into bugs. First off, before going into my rant on silly bugs, I should mention that everyone was blown away with the size of Quadralay as a company. They really couldn't believe that Quadralay was so small, and yet had such a complete product line. This fact alone put me in high regard as they came from teams of 30+ developers that produced less quality products. Back to bugs though... The biggest bug that I found was when working with a stationary in ePub 9.1. If I create a project from a stationary and add a document with a xref that was not available when the stationary was created, those xrefs will not be read and cannot be edited. This was a very frustrating bug that I was told had been fixed for 9.2. Nonetheless, it is very embarassing.

Embarassing as it was, bugs like this are not really that big of a deal. When I am sitting in front of a class as a developer, it is hard because I am seen as not only an expert but a creator of the product. They feel like they can simply ask, "Why didn't you do this right" because I am sitting right there. When this happens it is very frustrating to say the least. For one thing, our developers are my friends and smart developers! I hate to see flaws in their code exposed in a public and somewhat embarassing way. It is also frustrating because I make an effort to describe our application in a way that supports more business, so small problems make this hard.

As frustrated as I was at the time, a day or two later I realized that bugs just happen. Considering the robust and open nature of our product, our bug count is pretty low and fixes seem to happen very quickly. I also realized that most bugs are really just silly mistakes that are bound to happen. Programming is never a fuzzy task, so writing code that gracefully handles different requirements flawlessly is near impossible. My resolve is that next time I do training and run into a bug, I am just going to take the heat and smile knowing that it is probably fixed already!