The Tricky Deployment Part 2: Why it was success after all

I told you about the tricky deployment that my team run during 3 days in order to integrate a 6 months worth of development for a particular large project – Project Success – and why it went so bad and failed so much that from an original estimate of 6 hours – 2 hours x 3 heads – it jumped to a 240 hours – 30 hours x 8 heads – nightmare. What I haven’t talked about is why even with all failure it was a gigantic success.

No it haven’t generated any ROI so far, or have driven traffic or led any business innovation till now: it have just entered into User Agreement Testing and will only launch later on. So how can I tell it was a success? Well, because it was team success.

When Project Success came to our plate early on 2009, my team was managed by a very peculiar manager and we wouldn’t follow any specific software development methodology or culture – it was old-school operation management, still it was a really strong manager and the one who brought that team together and build it up from scratch. When things changed in the organization, and our original manager was replaced – and the new manager took us to a more Agile based culture – I took some time to talk with him before we “lose” contact, and I asked about the team’s strengths, and how he could see us taking advantage of it. His answer was really remarkable to me, he said there was no team strength till that point and that we still needed to be put to test.

We needed to cross the fire together and prove who we really are under pressure. We needed to fight against odds and succeed as a team, cooperating as team. And that’s what we did.

During the three unplanned days that lasted the deployment process, almost half of the team was there, cooperating, giving input, expressing ideas, exposing concerns, showing weakness and taking advantage of others and own strengths. And the other fellows that couldn’t be present kept in touch, one way or another, checking back at night or following e-mails during the day – or even covering the shift of the weekend guys on the following Monday. We were a real team there.

Another point that made it a successful deployment was the charismatic and unshakable presence of our Project Manager during the three days. He was there gluing all the pieces, simplifying processes, clearing our doubts, tracking all the issues and making sure the team was owning up to them and syncing up on the progress. He was also there remembering we were doing a great thing giving up on our weekend to put the program back on track – he kept thanking us for that. I know it’s his job, but he did a hell of a good job there and was certainly critical for this to work out right.

With all that, in three days we fixed ~65 issues (as shown by the branch log), and were able to keep all environments stable and in sync. This made we go well enough on UAT for a soft launch on Tuesday morning and left us pretty confident to keep dividing and conquering defects throughout the week – not the weekend, or so I hope – to get ready for the next phase of the project. Project Success it is.

More on that next phase at some point.

Learning and improving: The tricky deployment

The weekend just ended and I almost didn’t see it. I’ve been in a non-stop mode since Friday when we began the deployment process of a really large project into the staging environment for stakeholders UAT. Our original estimates, back on Friday, were 2h for merging, integrating, validating and communicating the end of the process. However, when we finally communicated the end of the process on Saturday at 1:30PM CST, about 30 hours had been spent by each of the almost 7 developers working throughout the weekend. Lot went wrong – and there’s a lot to learn from it.

The Project Success – as I’ll call it from herein – run in development phase for about 6 months, and it’s just the initial phase of what will be a product stream. My team was working on the front-end, using standard web technologies, pull mode MVC, and running other different and smaller projects in parallel. There was also a back-end team, working specifically for this project and having support from another team developing the main application which this project would add to at some point. Our teams run their own flavored scrum with 2 weeks development cycles, and followed their own branching strategies. Overall process and teams integration went just fine I would say.

So what went wrong? Nothing, but lots of things. I mean, we successfully reached a really important milestone, in time, on budget and with a good progress and results on what was essential for the business. But we failed on plan, anticipate and prevent technical issues that went a little further than just technical debt.

I’ve put up a list and I’ll be digging further into the items into the upcoming weeks, trying to get a better solution for them as priority and severity tell me and the team to do so. Here it is:

Weak branching strategy

Our setup consists in a Release branch, a Main branch and the Project  Success branch, where all development for the project occurred for about six months. We had reasons to do so, of course, but going forward we’ll need to look into something more consistent that allow us more flexibility on integrating progress across all branches.

As we’ll keep running different projects in parallel and our code for Success is really dependent on back-end code that only gets deployed once in 3 months, we’ll still need to maintain a proper branch to follow the back-end development but we’ll need to have a better solution on getting Main integrated into Success branch and vice-versa.

No integration culture

We were slow in integrating code bases, mainly because  of our weak branching strategy but there was more:

- Released code that was originally developed in Main and integrated into Release to then be promoted to production wasn’t integrated several times, what sometimes outdated core features that were base for new development. We ended up developing new features taking advantage of outdated code;

- Updates, optimizations and bug fixing made in Success branch never got integrated into Main, creating the reverse scenario of the situation on the previous bullet: Main would have new features developed on top of outdated code;

- Regression testing for core features or for features unrelated to the project were almost ignored on Success branch, we would throw whatever worked for the project and completely forget about other parts of the system that could break with it.

No testing process

Not only regression test was lacking but we actually didn’t – and still don’t – have a structured testing process. Before I go further, frankly, I really love TDD – though I never had the chance to practice it throughout an entire project with other adopters, but it just doesn’t cut it for our scenario: we work with HTML, CSS and JS – and C# and XSLT – and with awful loads of content, we do front-end; Although we can advocate TDD would do us good for JS and such, it still would be just a minor tool giving our constraints. I might be wrong though and our problem is just lack of technical expertise for it.

Anyway, we spend way too much time with manual testing and application scrubbing. Even after the final merge and integration we still found errors, after two days chasing and solving them. How come? Well, we just missed a specific set of components to test, because we just forgot, and there was no process, documentation or whatever to remember us about that.

Conclusion and next steps

There are still more things to analyze and more to dig in in order to understand our schedule slip and how to make sure we avoid it in the future, but we already got something to look into, and that’s what I’ll do. Research on testing and quality assurance process and culture, as well as continuous integration culture and branching strategy for distributed and dependent teams.

Fail is the closest step to success, and Project Success is really close now. The key is to keep learning from errors and never ignore them. Stay tunned.

Not right, nor wrong: it’s all about style

When it gets to what to do, or not to do; what to be, or not to be, there’s really no right or wrong. It’s all about the style you want to follow, the way you want things to be, and the way you want people to view you. Even more when it comes to communication.

Whether you are a friendly figure or a right-to-the-point type, you’ll never be able  to please everyone around. Some people like to receive kind messages with shiny greetings and good wishes in the end. Some others like to get the relevant content and nothing more, they even get annoyed by the noise of cheap talk. I feel this is true for e-mails, instant messages, phone calls and in person contact.

Some people will feel offended when you drop a note like

Hey bud, you broke that, can you please take a look?

They’ll find “bud” cynic. They’ll find the “can you please” bossy… and so forth. They just can’t stand it because it was right to the point. You didn’t call their name, you didn’t thanked at the end, you haven’t taken the time to take a look at it for yourself… all this will be problems for certain people. Add all these and you’ll get a good memo content, that would leave another people annoyed by the amount of content and useless info, when all you needed was to call out an issue.

You can work your way out of it by approaching each person, or each group of people, in a different way, which is usually recommended, but still you might just want to follow your own path and keep consistent. I try to do both, maintaining an equilibrium between them: I’m Rafael Bandeira, a mix of a right-to-the-point, cold joker, and slightly self-confident – always approaching you the way I feel is more appropriate for our relationship. That’s my style, whether you like it or not.

This style, just as any personal attribute, shouldn’t be a single immutable definition as you have to evolve with time and experience, as you start learning new things and getting exposed to different people behaviors. You should assimilate these and add to your own manners what you feel like needed and get rid of the rest. If you are confident enough about your personality, that you feel like it doesn’t have anything else to change, then you are probably stuck in time. Keith Richards feelings, you know what I mean.

At work, when dealing with so many different people, it’s hard to keep up with everybody when you chose to follow a line, as it can always be inconvenient to someone out there to deal with it. I like to do some cold jokes, with a touch of sarcasm, not because I want someone else to laugh, but because that’s who I am! Still, not everyone likes it and although I can try to avoid that, when I eventually upset someone with it, I can only count on my own style again to decide what action to take: do I ask for excuse or do I leave it as is?

I have even already received some feedback on how I sounded rude sometimes or how I seemed way to playful to deal with a severe issue. Those are all welcome and will certainly help me to improve myself, still, they don’t say that I’m wrong. They just say I’m not totally right – which is fine, and that I have to take more care when discussing a given subject or contacting a given person.

It’s up to you whether you want to be everyone’s friend or be remembered by your own characteristics, tone, approach and responsiveness. Just make sure you got your cup empty for new ideas on that.

February reading plan

February is right around the corner and I must be ready for its arrival if I want to stay on track with my 2010 goals. I still have to organize the way I keep track of my movies list to be able to plan for it and evaluate my progress on movies watched by week and my thoughts about them – this is part of the exercise, to ensure I pay attention and take the most out of the movie experience. While I’m not set on how to approach movies, I’ve been having some fun using goodreads.com to keep track of my bookshelf and reading habits, and kind of liked the idea of posting reviews here – I know it was only once.

As a new exercise, I’ll share my plan for the upcoming months as they get close – or when I come to define it, so I might end up having some input from somebody out there.

I’ll keep running in the business and general knowledge line that I started on January with The Tipping Point and Inside Steve’s Brain, which I found refreshing as it’s not totally focused on all the technical and career related subjects I’m prioritizing on my reading, but still add some value to it in some way. With that said, it’s interesting to note that they also work as a kind of warm up to a possibly more complex reading coming in the future.

Also, I really liked Malcolm Gladwell’s style, theories and concepts, and I want to dive more into it. Again, it’s not whether it’s right or wrong, it’s all about making sense – and it really does to me.

So here it is, my February reading plan:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

From Andy Hunt, co-author of the outstanding The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, this book also comes from the so called Pragmatic Bookshelf and targets programmers that want to take the best out of their work and job with concepts and practices “from the trenches”. The Pragmatic Thinking and Learning is all about learning how to approach learning and manage your knowledge, and how to take advantage of our thinking capabilities.

I’m really excited to start diving into this one. I really liked the Pragmatic Programmer practical style and expect to see the same applied here. Also, as programmers or whatever role operating on the software field, we are heavily hammered with information all time, from design specs to new technologies, and from bug fixes to development strategies, our brain is the engine that makes it possible for all this to be assimilated and translated into practical actions, so it definitely deserves some attention.

One of the paths that led me to this book was the thrilling Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep presentation by the other Pragmatic Programmer author, Dave Thomas. On the presentation, he goes on mapping the Dreyfus Model to the software development universe and showing how to use it to develop expertise among different levels of programmers. Recommended.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Here I go trying another Malcolm Gladwell’s – the same author of The Tipping Point, which I read on January. This book discusses the very first instant reaction that we have towards new events and ideas and adverse situations, how it works and how to exercise it in order to make the best use of it. It’s the averse of thinking: it’s about impulse and subconscious reactions.

I’ve already taken a quick read on the first chapter and it looks quite promising. Blink presents its theory using real stories and several studies about behavior and thinking – once again as in The Tipping Point, if you are not interested in the book itself but happens to be a data junkie, you might find it useful.

–

As you can see, I’m eager to know more about how my brain operates and how I can take advantage of it and become more effective on making decisions and responding to all sorts of information and events and stimulus that make my everyday life. Stay tuned for reviews on these!

web development is a big MVC

Like it or not. Know it or not. At a conceptual level, MVC is everywhere. You can easily map all the architectural components of MVC in most – if not all – development setups. And when you get to that point, it becomes really easy to understand it and use it in different platforms and languages.

MVC where?

The concept is easy: M stands for Model, which is the data, the pattern, the business need; V stands for View, which is the presentation, the display, the interface that represents the Model; and the C stands for Controller, which is the application layer, the software work that is needed to control the input to fit the Model, and to provide of the View for the data.
It’s certainly not new for most of us as MVC has become ubiquitous since the Rails mania attacked the web development world back in 2005, and still is a hot trend for all sorts of developers.

The point is, even if you are not using Rails, CakePHP, Django or Apache Struts you are still using MVC – or you are doing spaghetti. You’ve heard of it before, it is called “separation of concerns”.

Let’s take the root of a web application, the client-server architecture, for instance. The Model is the pages and scripts and binaries and all the content on the server. The View is whatever comes from there in form of plain text, or HTML, or XML, or even images and the like that are rendered by the client. The Controller is the HTTP protocol that is controlling all the traffic, and input and output that the application needs to serve its business goal.

Another example can be the front-end of a web application. The HTML is the Model, where all the data and content is. The CSS is the View which transforms the content in a presentable interface for the application user. And the Javascript is the Controller that controls all different interactions between in the View layer that intend to modify itself and the Model.

A more common example would be the server-side programming architecture. Notice that I’m not even talking about any MVC framework and just the concept behind every server-side application, independent of the language used to build it. Here the Model is your database – not necessarily a proper database platform, but even a bunch of .csv files would do it. The View is the HTML, JSON or XML served as output. The Controller is the the whole set of scripts, classes, plugins and whatever else used to handle requests, process data and provide output.

Now we end in an interesting situation, where HTML is the Model from the front-end standpoint, but the View from the server-end standpoint. And that’s the whole idea here. In the end of the day, MVC is everywhere. Even when it’s not there, it is there.

Micro and Macro: MVC at all levels

The CSS language is a proof that MVC is the optimal approach and goal for all layers that compose an application, otherwise we would still be using spaghetti HTML, mixing the presentation with the data, the View with the Model, leveraging tags and attributes to define layout and styles for the page content. Still, if you look closer you’ll see that even without CSS we are still using the MVC concept at tag level, having the whole View structure on the attributes and the content inside the node – separating the concerns.
Again, it is not by coincidence. It’s the optimal approach that is conceived by all sane programmers in all macro and micro levels of coding.

<table bgcolor="#777777">
    <tr>
        <td>
            <font face="Verdana" size="4" color="#00FF00">
                This paragraph tag has...
            </font>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

With this, the HTML – that is the Model for the front-end layer, and the View for the server-side layer – is also a structure built of several levels of MVC implementations. And that’s what makes it for a pretty acceptable markup language: even when you do spaghetti coding, it still is cool.
Unfortunately, that is not true for all the programming languages, so when you build on top of spaghetti code on them, it won’t be cool: it will be nasty and unreadable and people who review your code will suffer, and the application maintenance will be expensive, and the world will be an uglier place.

The key for HTML success on fast learning and mastering is that it’s a readable language, logically extensible in such way that it gets hard to screw with the result. It applies the MVC, the separation of concerns, everywhere. You can always grab a piece of foreigner code and make sense of it in a few minutes. As general programming languages are far more complex and flexible, there’s no built-in structure to help programmers not to mess up with everything, then it falls on the programmers responsibility to consider it in order to write decent code chunks.

The concept can be applied everywhere, from loops iterations to logical checks, from object structures to functions’ scope, and the result tends to be always more elegant and friendly. I’ll pull some examples in a part 2, but it’s too late here. See you!

Book Review | The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Quick review on Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

The book develops on top of the theory the author calls “The Tipping Point”, in which simple and modest things can make big difference in whether a message, a behavior, a product, a disease and whatnot becomes an epidemy or fails to deliver any significant result.

The writing

The basic concepts that surround the theory are presented and extensively defended and grounded with examples and case studies, always citing several experiments and studies somehow related to specific details of the concept. This is an interesting approach as it won’t just give a good credibility to the idea, as it will also present other ideas and concepts coined in different times and by different people, but that in the end help to suggest and defend the same things that the book author is writing about.

Still on the book approach to the ideas and concepts presented, the fact that the it will only run on top of the homonymous theory, defending it on its own and without stating whether it’s good or bad, right or wrong, and without attacking any other subversive concept, makes it for a compelling and enjoyable read.

The content

Running on top of 3 pillars: The Lay of the Few, the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Context, The Tipping Point theory suggest that only a few outstanding individuals are able to get in touch with a message and pass it on to several different individuals from distinct groups and cultures with the credibility of a friend, or can assimilate all the details of it and translate in a compelling way for the larger audience, or can be charming enough to draw and influence others to accept it.

It also suggests that details on how a message is presented determine how sticking it can be, what will make it for a remarkable experience and convert people to its interests. And how the context of time and circumstance, and audience and their boundaries can provide the necessary power for the message to last, convince or just spread like wildfire.

I found it specially interesting how short and quick the “Conclusion” chapter is, and how it needn’t be any longer, as you will inevitably map all the concepts presented back to your day-to-day experiences and all the trends you end up taking sides with. At some point things just seem to fit it, and it all makes sense.

The afterword by the author goes on how to take advantage of the Tipping Point concept to create develop your own messages and turn it on a tipping point for your goals. It also presents 3 new topics, showing how the isolation generated by the contemporary life helps different messages to tip among kids and teens, and how immunity can make an epidemic to cease and how important the people who are able to translate messages for larger audiences are, and why messengers should take special care of them to make sure they always have a good translation of their messages.

That’s it

Recommended reading for data junkies by the amount of data related to studies and surveys that are presented. For business folks and marketers also.
I also got Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking from the same Malcolm Gladwell, and will start reading it on February. Looking forward to it!

… find me on goodreads.com to share your thoughts with me and recommend me some good books!

me on book reviews

With the whole book fuzz that I’ve been in since last year, I started experimenting different ways to improve my reading skill and experience. One of the things that helped me was taking books to the office and give it quick lookups between a reboot and a rebuild. Other was setting time aside from my common schedule just to focus on the book. After some try and error I got a few techniques in place that make me feel more productive on the matter. One of them is book review.

I have done very little publicly on it though. A quick look on my goodreads.com account will show a few short reviews that are much more general comments than anything close to a review of the book, the writing and the content. But I definitely want to do more, and that’s the point where I’ll get to soon.

It’s not entirely new for me. I’ve done formal book reviews once for Paula Mastroberti, a Brazilian author that wrote and illustrated fantastic books that were a re-read of great classics of literature like Goethe’s Fausto, Homero’s Odissey and Cervante’s Quixote. In her version of the stories, the plot would roll in our modern times and all the different characters would be adapted to meet all their madness and tragedy within our day-to-day lives. Fausto became a sold-soul rockstar, while Quixote was turned into a suburb hero – succumbed to his madness wearing shiny and bright 80’s disco outfit. Fun indeed.
It was a long time ago, but as you can see, I liked reading before I started working.

The exercise of writing book reviews is a good way to keep memory in shape and making sure you squeeze the most out of the book content. It’s even better for non-literature books, like the technical and conceptual books about programming and economics,  as we recap the content and reinforce the lessons and concepts learned. Also, it’s very good to develop writing skills as well, and for a non-native English speaker like me, it’s something.

My deal is the following, as I set the goal to provide whatever kind of content here for my own pleasure and fun, and as I want to make sure I enjoyed and paid attention to all my books details, I’ll start posting more about the books and giving them a post-mortem review after reading it.
At some point I’ll start using only the goodreads.com service to do so, and will pull them here through their fine API, which I’ve been playing a bit for a few days.

Be in peace and correct my typos!

2010 feelings

So, 2010 is just the same thing as the last year, just with a new name. I agree.

Still it’s nevertheless a chance for us to rethink some stuff we’ve been doing and start committing to new goals and plans. It’s like the end of a long development cycle which New Year’s eve would be the post-mortem where you recall all those good and bad moments, analyze, get conclusions and learn more about your own experiences.

Philosophies aside, I came up with some really small and ongoing goals for 2010 that I thought of documenting here, and here we go:

Read (at least) 2 books per month. Watch (at least) a movie per week

This seems really awful but for the last three years I’ve had pretty much 3 activities: working, studying work, taking care of my kid. I gave up on everything else, and now I plan to have them back – little by little.
Till 2008 the last book I had read was “The Da Vinci Code” when it was released on Brazil (2004?) and since the year 2000 I would have read about 3 books. Then late in 2009 I discovered the joys of having those piece of papers in hand, and investing some focus and patience on them, I got in love with it and I’d never go back.
I’ll be true. I’ve been mostly reading about programming, project management, design and business, but at least I’ve been doing it – slowly and all, but doing it. I know I should expand my horizons and get some novels, romances and poetry, but no rush on this yet. I want to get better, by practicing, starting off with subjects of immediate interest, and as I’m young and want to grow professionally and financially – so that I can get closer to get myself and my kid a home of our own – I’m highly interest in all the topics around web development, communication, design and management that are more likely to help on it.

I’m a movie lover. I’m no the kind that know much about movies history or great directors and storytellers though. Still I’m fascinated about movies and how they make people feel, and all the “hidden” messages, characters’ motivations and so on. They are pretty much like a therapy session for me – and I like that.
Watching a movie per week is probably less than ideal, but I’ve been watching really few movies lately, so a predefined goal for this one is a good move. There’s not much rule, it doesn’t need to be anything of great intellectual value: comedies, love stories, blood-thrash-and-death… everything is allowed. But porn.

Blog twice a week

Last year I wrote how I would be a prolific blogger and all that jazz, and then I’ve only posted once or twice during the whole year of 2009. Well, I did tumble a few times in the last two months, but it was not public announced, and this is the first link for my tumblr in the web.

Tumblr is the game changer here, and is the reason why I do believe I can and will blog twice a week in 2010. Here’s why:

Doing it for myself
When I started writing on “Something on Everything” my focus was success. I wanted to produce programming related content that would be interesting for developers, that would come in tons to read it and I’d start using any kind of ad engine or affiliate program to make large sums of money out of it. Sad, isn’t it?
I would think and rethink 10 times about a subject before writing about it, and would only publish things that I thought would be able to drive visits and revenue in the future. I got a dozen titles in draft state and would never get them published before really “making sure” they would worth it. This is unproductive and let me stuck.

When I first used Tumblr, I thought of doing it in order to get up to speed again and restart blogging, like an exercise, and so I would keep it “private”. Doing so made me really confident as I was the only one I was trying to convince and please. All it would take before I push the button was a re-read. I wasn’t caring about making money out of it, or becoming a rock star in the dev community out there. All I wanted was to write about things I’ve been doing, learning and living.

Pleasing me and writing about my stuff was really fun. I even got to the point where I felt comfortable writing about my work and job inside Dell – and I really don’t like to associate Dell’s image with mine as I fear I might do any harm to the brand, still I wrote about it in a sweet and responsible way, which I don’t mind sharing and talking about.
Anyway, from now on then, it will be my style here. I’ll make it look like me and not like a product I’m trying to sell. This is what gives me pleasure.

Writing about everything
Other thing I’ve done on Tumblr was to write about different things of my life – and about my life in first place. I wasn’t only focused on programming or any specific community – like I used to be with CakePHP here. I wrote about product management, career, people, behavior… ok, I didn’t wrote much, that’s true, but I’ve expanded my content portfolio and it felt really nice.
I do like development and programming, and this will surely be the main subject of my writings, but I won’t be limited to it as I do love lots of other things, and I want to get them documented, shared and discussed with anyone interested in doing so.

I’m really willing to honor the title of this blog, which I choose so carefully more than a year ago.

I’m not sure I’ll keep using Tumblr for anything, but that’s not my main concern now. One thing is for sure, that is a hell of a great platform and application.

Play and finish some games

I am a big fan of games just as any other nerdy type we got out there. Most of what I learned on the English language came from games, and they were one of the reasons I took classes on it later on: everything to be able to watch and understand Diabl0 2 movies and mission details.
The last game I have really invested some time in playing was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion about a year and a half ago, still I never got about finishing it. Before that I’d have played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind without finishing it as well, as I moved to Oblivion when it got available. In the meantime I also played some Battlefield Vietnam which I still talk about as it thrilled me with the soundtrack made of late 60’s rock music instead of those classical war games drum-and-noise musics.

As part of the effort to get a happier life not so focused in work I plan on play and finish – where applicable – the following games this year:

• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Fallout 3
• Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu (yay, olde boy)
• Guitar Hero & RockBand as much as possible – I’m so addicted to them

Conclusion

I am in search for a more pragmatic life, where I can have something other than my job and work to talk about when I’m off for some beer with friends. I’m also looking for more knowledge, to get more expertise in things I “already know” and also to learn more new stuff in diverse areas. With that, I expect to be more calm and patient, and so, to be able to enjoy more moments with my daughter.

Looks promising, hu? What about you, have you been planing anything new?

IE8, is it really kicking?

I’ve been playing with IE8 since Microsoft made it available on its website.

Yes, I still try Microsoft: it’s what I’ve been using for almost three months now at the big D, and it’s ruled by Steve Ballmer – and he kicks asses up there.

Ok, so, what is it, why am I taking my precious time to talk about this release?
Well, guys over Microsoft labs seem to have been pushing hard to make this version of IE at least user friendly – let’s not expect it’s developers friendly, never forget it still is IE – but, HEY, haven’t already tested it in this field.

Tiered with file system (?)

First downside we have. I want a web browser, not a file browser. Please do not include network files in the auto-completion, I haven’t even used the browser to access them!

Overall UI

Tabs have suffered a drastic size reduction, they are clean and well tailored. They don’t even remember those ugly giants we had on the previous version.
Actually, all UI components were reduced, they don’t have that 800×600 Win98 look anymore.

Still on tabs, there’s a cool feature that colors them by group – once you open a tab from within another one, they get colored with a new color, so that you can keep track on what contents are related. Hot.
Also, you can now undo closed tabs, just like on Firefox.

The address bar is entirely revamped.
Auto-suggestion is fast, but may slow you down if you have already got used to use this Firefox feature that allows you to use page titles for search - IE8 only use the URL itself.
Domain highlighter – just like Chrome – and improved handling of selection in the URL string, have made it really sexy. Also the capability to delete stored entries with just one click, right there, is really interesting.

Developers gift

Web Developer Toolbar have been updated, and it really have become useful.
Sure it’s not Firebug. But we have web profilers, CSS controller, JS console and a lot of new features… and guess what: they work, and work pretty well and fast!
A downside we have here is that it’s not integrated on browser’s window. It really looks like WebKit Web Developers Tools.

Speed

It’s faster and lighter. You might even get surprised. They were able to cut down bootstrapping time, and page loadings – everything is running smoother. Google Chrome still’s faster, but they did a great job on optimizations.

Accelerators

The hot feature. Talking about it quick and dirty is easy: it’s a Ubiquity, but with the mouse.
Access web services within pages’ content to translate, google, mail and such… Cool.

So, maybe it’s just  a quick overview, and we might have tons of new features to discover.
Anyway, IE8 is worth it. He might not be kicking @sses but he definitely is replacing IE7 for good.

Kudos for IE devs. Yes, I said it.

See you.

Update to the new version!

Hey folks, just a quick walk back… I want to warn you that version 1.9 of this software is no longer supported and has been tagged as deprecated.

Version 2.0 was released today, full of bugs and inconsistency, but was considered pretty stable. Congrats to my mum that did this great job while coding the codebase, and to Nina by having constantly upgraded and updated the Moral, Happines and WillPower modules with uncountable patches using the “Kiss and Hugs” approach.

Also I would like to thank everyone who contributed for this new release, I’m very proud of having you guys around.

By the way, although the source code is currently being held by the big D, it shall go back to Foss world sooner.

So, feel free to congrat me for this new release, and be in peace.
- I won’t promise anything this time… as you know, I’m not very trusty when it comes to personal projects.

- it means I’m 20 years old now. Happy Birthday, me.