I am not a secretary

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

An email I sent today, to the team I’m working with on a client site. All names have been changed.

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It is seriously crazy how much time we are losing due to the coding practices used on the site.

For instance, this ticket simply asks that the word “Deal” be added to a title on some pages:

[link removed]

Nothing could be simpler, we just need to add one word to this page:

[link removed]

This is why I showed Althea how to use Subversion, to tackle this kind of stuff.

But in fact, nothing could be more complicated. The index method in the deals controller is 355 lines long. It redirects to different templates based on lots of if() statements. Just figuring out which template to edit took me 15 minutes.

And then it turns out that the title is set dynamically, and the logic that influences the title is spread across both the controller and the template itself.

So we end up in the situation where well-paid engineers need to act as secretaries, making minor text changes to templates. I’m aware that some engineers defend the heavy use of dynamic information/actions as a way to reduce redundancy in the code, but there are other needs that should be taken into consideration. A more literal style in the templates would help the organization, even if it meant some redundancy among templates. A more literal style would allow us to leave text edits to non-programmers like Althea.

What I wrote here is something I suggest for Shermans Travel:

http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/2009/05/19/empowering-great-designers-to-work-freely-with-the-html-in-a-symfony-project/