things that stink about building web applications
A list of decisions and such that I've had to make regarding the ongoing development of my companies web based help desk software. Mostly stuff I just need to get off my chest.
Where to start? - I always hate trying to figure out where to start. Do you do the underlying libraries, design, core functionality, wire frames, arghh.
The admin - Once you get going you almost always have to build the admin before you can go forward. Sure you have all kinds of great ideas for displaying help requests efficiently using this nifty widget, but guess what? You have to build 20 admin pages first in order to get stuff into your system to begin with and nothing is more boring than building admin pages.
Duplicate functions - Always great fun to discover you just spent 2 hours figuring out a different way to build a function you already created a month ago but forgot about.
Code reuse, hah - Sure you've built a page "just like this" a hundred times before but you can't really reuse that old code because now your using a different database abstraction or your templating differently or you don't know where you put that old code and it will take you longer to find or fix the old stuff than just writing it again.
Compatibility - Boy it's great Microsoft has several new browser competitors so I get to check everything on IE, FireFox,Safari, and Netscape cross-platform. (I exclusively use firefox but the business side of my brain still adds up the costs of checking all these)
Thanks