402: The Big List

Once the last major code knot was untangled -- once Tinderbox for Windows was firmly in the realm of engineering and not research -- we planned to make a big list of everything that needed to be done before the first beta build. We planned to have the list for Hallowe'en.

It gave us a fright.

My first reaction was simple.

There are 402 things on this list! This is obviously off by 200, maybe 300 things. Do it over!

So we made the list. And checked it, Twice.

402 is a good number.

It's not the right number. Our best estimate goes up and down all the time. But the real number is something like 402.

My second reaction was simple. "If we roll up our sleeves and work very hard, every day, all day, how quickly can we run through 402 things?"

That's the wrong question: we're already seeing lots of signs of overwork around the office, we're already running just about flat out. In any case, we can't completely clear the decks. TEKKA readers still need fresh TEKKA (and TEKKA 7 has some great stuff) Students everywhere will need to have their hypertexts waiting in the bookstore for second semester courses, which means we have lots of bookstore orders to handle now. There's an important new hypertext about to join the Eastgate catalog. Payroll needs to happen. Taxes need to be filed.

So, how quickly can we work through the list? We're gathering data -- which I hope to start sharing in the peekhole soon.

Today, we ticked off AgentManager, and TextPolicy, and MapPolicy, and started AbstractTextPane. (We also had a big TEKKA meeting, shipped a new Storyspace beta, and did plenty of other stuff) That seems to be about average; the speedometer has been as high as ten, and as low as 0.5, but 3-4 seems about average.

So: it appears that we're looking at Valentine's Day. Not the answer I wanted. But we're moving at a good clip.

There should be more action in the peekhole shortly.