There are several blog entries made by members of Software Team at Bumblehood, but none of them is mine. So to make things right, the first part of this post will be a short introduction with a little bit of history. My name is Marko, and I'm currently finishing studies at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (FER) at the University of Zagreb, with 3 exams left at the time of writing. Along with my studies, I have been working here at Bumblehood for about a year and a half as a college intern. A lot of things happened in that period. Bumblehood and Bumblemap projects developed from early system drafts made on blackboard in the office in Munich, to fully developed scalable application. This required a lot of work and effort, sometimes staying up all night making deployments and testing before the deadlines, but also we had some fun times while working.

For this first post I will write about experience gathered by working in the Software Team in Bumblehood and what are the highest priorities in making new features and releases. Bumblehood project encompasses many successful and proven tools for Java and Javascript development. Its backbone is the modular Spring Framework which is a top tool for building modern, scalable and extensive enterprise applications (replacement for bloated J2EE application servers). Most of the tools are open-source and they made our life a little bit easier. But relying only on good tools is not all. Far from it.

If you ask an average developer how long does it take to develop a wiki community portal software, he will probably say something like this: "I can make it in one weekend, and a high school student would do it in 2 weeks. It's trivial." In his eyes Bumblehood would be nothing more than an "Edit" button and "Submit" button. When you press "Submit", text is stored in database in some table and it's retrieved when you press a button on your mouse on the topic link. There is a tremendous amount of polish added to rough core system here at Bumblehood project. I know because I see the code every day :). A vast majority of users which are using Bumblehood agree that the overall user experience from start to finish is enjoyable. Ultimately, user experience is the only thing that counts. It's also a very complicated and abstract term. It goes far beyond a of list of features and sources of information, and consists of simple, clean and responsive user interface, page loading speed, page flow and much more. If users find what they need quickly without much fuss, that is also helpful. And the most important thing is that improving user experience is an iterative process. So every day one busy Bumblebee in the Software Team (and in other teams too :)) has only one goal in mind, and that is not making the best Bumblehood code ever, but making the best Bumblehood experience ever.

This was a short insight in Bumblehood software policy, I hope you liked the post! You can send me a message on my public wall whenever you need my help on Bumblehood, or if you just want to say hi!

PS. I didn’t make up this talk between 2 developers about triviality of developing software. I accidentally overheard this talk between two guys during lunch time in our team’s unofficial diner - Modena. :)

Posted by Marko Mrkus on July 30th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum