This, that and the other (may contain nuts)

Steve Castledine

First 7.0.2 IBM Blog Public Site Running

Steve Castledine  21 July 2006 10:52:44
Jeff Eisen (Chief Architect for Lotus Notes) now has a blog running and he is using the 7.0.2 IBM blog template.

I'm not even eating my own dog food yet (I love that phrase) so I'm praying I didn't mess up anywhere as if I did its one of those situations where everyone will know. Although I guess better it happen to Jeff than a customer - he can kick me, the customer side has bigger consequences.

The experience of taking a home grown template that has undergone 3 and a half years of development to a template that is acceptable by IBM standards has been eye opening and something that will have a postive affect on my own personnel development.

I have made a few mistakes along the way including (I don't mind admitting it and sorry if anyone I work with reads this!) spotting a view that was no longer needed the day I made a code submission and deleting it without retesting and then finding out the day after a chunk of code used it to do some (now unneeded) checking when saving a configuration document. What an arse I felt, one of my biggest faults is being a perfectionist with my work, so to do this was a self kick in the balls!

One thing I will say is do not expect a hat full of new features. The development effort has been entirely based on doing this conversion and testing in short deadlines. Hopefully there will be an opportunity after the first release to do the feature enhancement stuff.

I think when the blog template gets released in Beta form and then the public release around September I will be a busy man for a while answering queries etc. In the meantime I'm doing a few other things including some work on the mail template. This does freaks me a little - here's some software I used for so long now and obviously quite a few million people around the world (including the missus who uses it at the Probation service in England) and there will be a section I have done!

As you can see I'm still a starry eyed kid at IBM, in the sweet shop of his dreams with all the software around me and having the opportunity to collaborate with some great people. From day one it was wow, so heres the new Sametime 7.5 (by the way this has run for me for the last four months like a dream - no issues whatsoever), heres notes next, heres the innovation pack stuff etc etc.

Anyway I must stop rambling, it must be because I cannot move out of my seat this morning due to some nasty bruises and missing skin from a football match played on a very hard plastic pitch last night, which in the heat felt like running a marathon just to get from one end to the other!