Owned by the Monkey

No Vijay, it’s not what you think.

Last night at about 9 PM I thought I’d sit down and work on a new feature and try a few more interface tricks I learned. The concept is pretty simple – make bookkeeping so easy everyone on the team can do it. Hopefully through the process more projects are handled to completion by the same member of the team, there are no drops in communication between the person that sold, the person that provisioned and the person that billed the customer. It might even make people more cognizant of how money comes into the company and how through just a few more clicks we can be that much more productive. So the natural thinking process is, once the order is completed (say upgraded quota, or new ExchangeDefender account or whatever) there should be just a few more clicks to update all the accounting. It already happens on the backend, but from time to time there are questions, mistakes.. This just cuts a lot of phone calls.

This is where I pwned myself. Looking back, its almost like a self-fulfilling Dilbert strip staring me, from start to finish. I’m coming up with stupid features, I’m designing them, and at about 2 AM cursing myself for the stupid idea to do this in the first place.

First, I decided to allow the admin to create billing objects on demand.

Then, I decided that those objects shouldn’t be fixed but dynamic and buildable on demand.

Long story short, I went from a few HTML input fields and a few SQL statements to a full blown table, form, validation and query designer.

My brain hurts. I wish I was dumber, at least I wouldn’t be going to bed at 4 AM.