(I write only internal tools and I’m a team of one. We have a whole department of people working on public and customer focused stuff.)
My boss let me spend three months with absolutely no changes to functionality or UI, just to build a better, more configurable back end with a brand new config UI, partly due to necessity (a server constraint changed), otherwise I don’t think it would have ever got off the ground as a project. No changes to master for three months, which was absolutely unheard of.
At times it was a bit demoralising to do so much work for so long with nothing to show for it, but I knew the new back end would bring useful extras and faster, robust changes.
The backend config ui is still in its infancy, but my boss is sooo pleased with its effect. He is used to a turnaround for simple changes of between 1 and 10 days for the last few years (the lifetime of the project), but now he’s getting used to a reply saying I’ve pushed to live between 1 and 10 minutes.
Brand new features still take time, but now that we really understand what it needs to do after the first few years, it was enormously helpful to structure the whole thing to be much more organised around real world demands and make it considerably more automatic.
(I write only internal tools and I’m a team of one. We have a whole department of people working on public and customer focused stuff.)
My boss let me spend three months with absolutely no changes to functionality or UI, just to build a better, more configurable back end with a brand new config UI, partly due to necessity (a server constraint changed), otherwise I don’t think it would have ever got off the ground as a project. No changes to master for three months, which was absolutely unheard of.
At times it was a bit demoralising to do so much work for so long with nothing to show for it, but I knew the new back end would bring useful extras and faster, robust changes.
The backend config ui is still in its infancy, but my boss is sooo pleased with its effect. He is used to a turnaround for simple changes of between 1 and 10 days for the last few years (the lifetime of the project), but now he’s getting used to a reply saying I’ve pushed to live between 1 and 10 minutes.
Brand new features still take time, but now that we really understand what it needs to do after the first few years, it was enormously helpful to structure the whole thing to be much more organised around real world demands and make it considerably more automatic.
Feels food. Feels really good.
That’s awesome. Your manager had some rare foresight in that case.