Manroom 2.0

Published by jim on 10/26/2005 in events

before:
Rebuilding the Manroom - 4

after:

Rebuilding the Manroom - 6

Full before and after photoset on Flickr.

So the manroom is back in operation. We watched a few minutes of Law & Order last night and I realized how nice it is to have a space where the whole point of visiting is to veg. I missed having that space for even a week, hence the urgency of the rebuild.

I had been thinking a lot over the past few days about how home improvement is nothing at all like software development. I mean with the launch of Manroom 2.0 I squashed a decidedly large number of show-stopper bugs during the rebuild (unsealed masonry behind the drywall being one of the larger bugs). However, were it not for the flooding last week, there’s no way in hell I would have voluntarily ripped out drywall and insulation or recarpetted the floor with a better pad.

The biggest difference is that w/r/t software there is a really low barrier to tweaking, mod’ing and deploying changes to existing code. Even in the worst-case scenario of really poorly written code (as CF is discovering in doing a rewrite of one of my first-ever development attempts ;-) re-writing code is never as laborious or dirty or exhausting as taking down something that’s been nailed together. Which means that as a developer you could (though you probably don’t want to) take risks and shortcuts that a home improvement DIYer could never take.

That being said, one of the key efficiencies of software development (at least web-development) is the immediate feedback cycle (Save, Refresh, Check). It’s really difficult to get that type of feedback when you’re doing construction at home. However, mother nature definitely obliged me in some pretty quick feedback testing. Within 48 hours of my gutter re-engineering and drylocking of masrony, we got hit with a very early nor’easter that dumped several inches of rain in providence. The basement passed with flying colors which meant we were ready to go live well ahead of schedule. And by go live i mean fire up the TiVO.

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