shaver

Saturday and Sunday were spent driving to Ottawa, getting our mad visitation on in Ottawa, and then driving back. Sunday evening found us at Dad’s in Markham, enjoying the pool, shade, and BBQ to the limit imposed by local authorities.

After the driving and swimming, I was a little stiff when I woke up yesterday morning. It was nothing serious, though, so I had to make sure it became serious by playing the first Ultimate game of the season last night with but a single sub.

We had a great time, and also won, but this morning found me more than a little stiff. Quite a bit more than a little stiff. “When did my desk get to be so far away from my bed?” stiff.

The stretching and Vitamin I have returned me to service, though, so I’m off to get lunch, and then, well, then I help Madhava and Kate move into their nifty new apartment, or something.

We’re looking to get a Lightning 0.8 out around the end of this month, in order to start to get user feedback on it, and shift the development model to one that’s a little more conservative in terms of architectural overhauls. We’re also running into decisions with our user interface and behaviours that we would like to make with the benefit of some more actual usage data, and want that coverage as well as exposure to the various kinds of real-world data and operations that will help us robustificate the lower-level components.

We wanted to reach this point with Lightning quite some time ago, or at least I did. I’ve been misestimating software schedules for more than a decade now, and I’m really starting to get good at it.

For one thing, the cost of doing the infrastructural overhauls for a more server-friendly calendar core was greater than we thought, especially as we were trying to keep Sunbird breathing as well as bring up a different calendaring model in Lightning. I think that cost was worth it — the architecture we have in calendar/base is one that we’re pretty proud of, and it’s the result of having to make changes to accomodate actual application code that wants to deal with exceptions, and recurrence, and the ICS standard, and present a decent user experience through all of it.

The usual problems with competition for developers’ time, unpleasant dependency cascades, and the occasional bit of feature creep also caused us to slip. Nothing novel there, we just get to take that pain in public more than some other shops. (Perhaps not as public as we could have been; wiki updates and blog postings have been fewer and farther between than would have been what the kids call “ideal”.)

I’ll post in the future a little more about the details of Lightning 0.8, how we’re framing our goals, and what we expect it to look like. I’m pretty excited about getting it out for the world to see, and even to hear the inevitable criticisms of the choices we’ve made so far. Bring it on!

Michael Jackson’s in court, and I really don’t want to talk about the details of that case any more than I just did.

I have a long backlog of posts (lightning plans, a response to Frank Hecker’s excellent disruptive-innovation Firefox analysis, travelogue, congratulations to friends of all sizes) that I have been putting off finishing because I really, honestly, am too damned busy.

But!

I cannot let this pass: CNN has an honest-to-god scorecard for the various charges and counts at play here. I…but….

Stunning.