Random observations of a new publically facing Chef website.

First time using speakr.chef.co – musings and observations

I hope I won't hurt anyone's feelings by below, below is what I see as an engineer. Every time I see similar pages, I make a conscious choice to overlook these defects, it could be because I trust the site, or because I found the thing I need.

There is no way in hell I would know how to write an existing page, or actually implement the changes I noted. But what I find most fascinating about my job, is there is a guy somewhere in the company – every company - who knows exactly what comma to change to address the issue. If I were a business, I would seek these guys out, and reward them with titles, work from home schedules, “work on your own problem”, etc... It's just so un-economic and un-business like to lose them.

To business:

The experience has been an exercise in patience, but only due to an unfortunate coincidence of API incompatibility:

                The GeekWire even was announced using the Seattle address which excluded ZipCode:

                "Oct. 1-2, 2015, Sheraton Seattle, 1400 Sixth Ave."

                ( URL: http://www.geekwire.com/events/geekwire-summit-2015/ )

Executive Summary: Overall Conclusion:

This experience instantly demonstrated the inferiority of this form of entry, as compared to the auto context/syntax entry offered by modern companies. If this is an internally developed tool for anything other than a personal project, it should be replaced with a real tool meant for the job.

Error 1:

The speakr input fields request ZipCode as a mandatory field.

Result 1:

I had to visit google maps, enter the partial address to get the ZipCode to unblock myself.

Pretty sure my mom would get past this now.

Error2:

As @echohack says - Default matter. There is non-primary field that requests event start time. The defaults of the all 4 fields are set to 23:00. Meaning the entries are valid data type, but values for start date are totally off.

Musing:

I think an 8am is a nice default for "start time" on "start date".

Possible scenario: a study of booking data found that most people fly in a day before, and they actually do want the start time to be 11pm for previous day for a networked dinner.

After digesting things over, above doesn’t make sense, because this isn’t an expense system. An event system should specify actual start time.

Result 2:

Had to make a couple of extra clicks to change the start time.

Error 3:

On initial event creation webpage threw errors: "Invalid start date", "Invalid end date". Clicking on start/end date fields again and resubmitting the form resulted in successful creation message.

Result / Assumptions

The drop off rate here is probably very high. I actually almost gave up here.

I wonder if there is monitoring or metrics in place to see this kind of drop off. Unlikely, but I do wonder if there is an easy to implement “business flow” monitoring solution for that like Zabbix.

Personal research todo: I wonder if paid version of google analytics is significantly faster at page load times than free one.

Error 4:

Allowed creation of events which have already occurred.

Possible scenario:

Could be a feature too I guess.

Musings:

Might be a good idea to check if there is an anti-spam mechanism on event creation button.

Wonder if vanilla code coverage would pick something like this up, or if you need something like Fortify.

Error 5:

After successful event creation, that event would not show up in search results on events.chef.io.

Possible causes is the refresh job on events jobs is not triggered instantly, the page is not yet hooked up to events, past events are ignored as a result of a conscious choice (possibly even from business), or something else entirely.

Overall Conclusion:

This experience instantly demonstrated the inferiority of this form of entry, as compared to the auto context/syntax detection offered by modern companies. If this is an internally developed tool for anything other than a personal project, it should be replaced with a real tool meant for the job.