Yet another sunset picture from Coronado that looks just like all the other ones I've taken ... sorry.

What a long weekend. While looking for that picture of Potter in the previous post, I ended up finding a whole bunch of old pictures from college. I finally got around to getting my scanner working with my laptop (the drivers are from 2003 - ouch), so I ended up scanning a whole bunch of old pictures.

Work, as expected, is being pretty brutal. Two immediate projects have to be launched: one big client project, and Lyons. Afterwards, I'll have the task of driving the cleanup of the MindTouch Developer Center. This is a pretty daunting task; the design doesn't lend to good content discovery, the content needs editing polish and reorganization, and we don't quite yet have all the pieces yet to support smooth single sign-on between Deki, vBulletin and Mantis without a separate home-rolled piece of software (DekiSocial). Fortunately, we have tons of content, so it's just a matter of presenting it well.

There's been piecemeal progress on MDC - Corey's graciously started trying out ideas for cleaning up the documentation, and there are a lot of suggestions on improving MDC so far. The biggest issue, for me, is the IA of MDC. Navigation between properties is atrocious. I figured I could use the blog as a starting point to start sketching out ideas for potential layout ideas. So this weekend, I worked on a very simple design for MDC:

Incomplete items in this design: logo and footer

The design itself is pretty minimalistic - I'm concerned that trying to create a fancy design will be hard to translate into the vBulletin, Mantis, and Deki. For engineers trying to find how-tos and documentation, content is king. The design should do its best to stay out of the way (hence the neutral feel). I'm not sure how much overlap there will be in structural design elements for each sub-site in MDC ...

I'm feeling OK about this design - it's not completely polished, and could probably use a passover from a second (or third) set of design eyes (thank goodness we have talented designers at MindTouch). The markdown for the design was relatively straightforward; see it in its HTML/CSS breakdown.

I got to take a break from this tonight by grabbing some dinner with Corey and Pam at Red Lobster - I was awfully disappointed they got rid of their endless shrimp promotion (sad).

Afterwards, headed over to Pacific Beach to work with Guerric on identifying bugs which must be fixed for Lyons. As we go into stabilization period, we'll be going into a "zero bug bounce" mode, where our team will have goals of closing every bug linked to the Lyons release. I had over 250 bugs assigned to me - I've triaged it down to 90 bugs (of which 30 bugs are must-fixes for Lyons).

Now I'm back home, but I have an urge to fire up the laptop and get some development work done - there's still so much UI work left to be done with polishing all the features we crammed into Lyons.

I can't wait for the weight of these multiple projects to get off my shoulders - I can't wait for February to come!

Update: I got distracted by a two-hour project. I'll write about it tomorrow. For now, I sleep.