This is a second chapter in a series – the first chapter is “Starting the Co-op.”
Following that first successful cycle, we decided to wait through New Year’s, 2007 to open a new cycle. This gave me a nice, solid month to work away at the site, polishing away the last few bugs, and generally getting things locked down for production.
I settled in, the second week in December of ‘06, to start patching up these past few bugs. What I quickly found, however, was that this software was nigh-unpatchable. Every time I’d try to add or remove a feature, everything would break. I don’t mean a couple error messages would show up – I mean the page would simply not appear. Locked up. No errors in the log. Dead.
The Oklahoma software, you see, was built over several years, by people who were not professional programmers. They were students and foodies – and they did admirable work. Yet, there was not a consistent design standard or vision, and the result of that was a big ball of “spaghetti code” – code that’s great when the sauce is on it, but is awful if you need to change out specific noodles. (So that metaphor doesn’t work right. Oh well.) Plus, even they still considered the whole package “beta” – and not the “works really well Google-style” beta, either.
