leff and the big project

Work's been hella busy lately. So much so that I feel completely justified using the adjective 'hella'. On monday night at about 2am it finally paid off. That's when the release went out. There was a bunch of stuff that went out; my bit is not directly user facing so it's not even mentioned in the press release.

My bit was to implement a CMS that covers the bulk of the informational sections of the site. Before, most of the content lived in JSPs that were just part of the system. Which meant we had to do a push of the whole thing just to fix a typo. Which is a big deal involving a bunch of people. With the CMS in place we can push content by running a single shell script. It's a good thing it's easy; we've done it twice more this week.

In the process I ended up redoing all the html and a lot of the css on those pages, so I guess I do have some user facing stuff. You can see it in the about, buy and sell sections. Of course, I didn't do everything there, just the data definitions in Bricolage and the Mason templates that build pages from them. I'll talk more about that on the Redfin dev blog sometime. I had a ton of help and I send a big shout out to everybody; you know who you are.

If this sounds like a "I'm done. I can finally relax." post, it's not. Now that it's so easy to do, we're pushing content once a week. And I still have a bunch of stuff in the next big release. So, if anything, it'll be more hectic. I think we're past the 11 hour days for a while though. *whew*