Johan; thinking out loud.

Writing the previous post got me thinking:

I would like to have an open sourced free hosted translation service available.
It should offer procedures and tools for localizing .NET applications. A developer should be able to upload a bunch of strings and some context describing text so that volunteering individuals could translate them online.
It could be set up so that you got one string translated in return for translating another string. So if you know one language you could log in to the site and translate other developers stuff and get your things translated in return. This way you could pay someone to translate string to one language on your behalf and you would get more languages in return.

I’m not quite sure how the Ubuntu translations work but I guess we could learn a lot from them.

Is this already done or will it be done before I have had the time to think this through?

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The current job is about defining/refining and documenting a system that is a couple of years old. I was a big part in building it initially but it has grown without much control since then.
As I see it, the main reason it is hard to get a grasp of it now is because there is (or has never been) a central role to consolidate the development. For each little project there has been a new project manager who only wanted to do his part at the lowest cost or him. No one has taken, or gotten, responsibility for all of it. This has led to more than one ugly hack to solve the same issue in different sub projects.
Now they have taken the opportunity to try to figure out what functionality there actually is, and what should be reused or refactored.

This is the first time my deliverables aren’t code. Starting with a blank sheet is always hard, but I remembered FreeMind, a free mind mapping tool. It helps a lot with the blank sheet syndrome since one can start dumping information in it and organize it later. Of course that is possible in any other text editor, but the graphical metaphor of FreeMind helps, at least me, get over the writers block.

I haven’t run FreeMind in Vista before so it was not very pleasant to discover that all file operations on new files failed. I solved it by copying one of the document that came with the install. When I double click it in my favorite file manager it starts FreeMind and I can save changes to ‘old’ documents. It is apparently a known bug so I will keep recommending FreeMind to any one who wants to listen.

I used to build my documentation for logview4net in a commercial competitor called Mind Manager. I think I will start using FreeMind for both logveiw4net and jsiPodFetch in the future.

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It is quite interesting to see how developers are affected by a projects perceived market value and internal company status.

When a new project is started people are usually open for new ideas and most of the involved does things to move the project forward. A direction that is not allways the same for an individual as the group, but at least it’s moving.

When the project has been going for a while and it hasn’t delivered as planned, decisions might be made to rewrite parts of the system, partly to show the market that it is able to adapt and partly to get the staff moving again. At this point those developers that usually are in the lead of getting things done starts looking for other jobs.

The only ones left are those who don’t get things going by them selfs and a few high spirited still believing in the project. So now all those that should bring some forward momentum to the project, managers, architects and so on, are the kind of people that prefer status quo, and the few still inspired has to fight to get anything done and to try to inspire all the rest.

If all of those high spirited people has found other jobs management might bring in external resources to develop the new functionality. This will make the crisis even worse since the employees now will think that all inspiring activities are done by overpaid consultants, which makes them even more resigned and uninspired.

If the perception that the organization will continue to finance the project gets hold the project will also get the staff from other departments that would like to do their eight hours a day without involvement.

This is a mess that it is hard to get out of. It is not easy to hire an inspired commited developer to a stale team like this without tricking him in some way, and that will only make him quit asap. I think management has to create more or less fictive goals so that the staff can see results. Management will also have to convert some of the staff to evangelists within the team so that they can motivate all others.

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