So having moved desk from one side of the room to another, I have lost my view of the sea. Oh well, this is where technology has come to the rescue and returned my calming view...

Note: I think this is running in British Summer Time (BST) rather than GMT or it's clock is seriously off. Otherwise it's a picture from the future (see photo timestamps).

So I'm starting to get the impression that I no longer tender for brand new projects competing with time and cost in order to win the bids. Recently, more and more people have been asking if I can take over a project that has been abandoned by its developer.

I've started writing this article because I find myself forgetting to ask something that could have saved an infinite number of man-hours (I exaggerate a little); but seriously, I needed a checklist that works for me.

Most Difficult?
My hardest project was (still is) one created by a PhD student who graduated and left the institution. It was a custom-built site written from scratch, and it's purpose was to manage Staff and Students within the Additional Learning Needs group. These are staff who take lecture notes for people of all disabilities and assist the students for the duration of their course. It had to allow for synchronizing with the official student record system and timetabling system (done via file upload). It included it's own timesheet / session management / invoicing system.

The website was held on a virtual host running PHP and MySQL. There was no documentation, logs, notes, and any code comments were in Hungarian (later found out it was slang or a dialect not understood by most Hungarians). Fellow students and system administrators could not accurately describe what the system was for and what it does. The developer had created the system to only last during one academic year, and the system itself only just about understood academic years (required tweaking twice a year). Then there were the error logs... some 20000 errors per use of a feature over 4 seconds. Do some developers never check the errors log?

By the time, I started maintaining the project, a revamp had been agreed with another web team. This has been delayed somewhat and still after 2 years there is no new site (blamed on the customer for not knowing what their application did in the first place... tut tut. How long have you been a developer? And this is new?).

To be honest I saw this on some Joomlaworks Blog who appropriately title it "A must see for professional webdesigners". If you're a developer relying on clients for your income, then at least watch some of this.

March 2011 San Francisco, CreativeMornings (creativemornings.com) was Mike Monteiro, Design Director, and co-founder of Mule Design Studio (muledesign.com). This event took place on March 25, 2011 and was sponsored by Happy Cog and Typekit (who also hosted the event at their office in the Mission).

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Date       Customer        Time From       Time To          Hours
---------- --------------- --------------- ---------------- --------------
04/03/2011 Tweedle Dee     10:00           12:00            2.00
08/03/2011 Tweedle Dum     23:30           00:30            -23.00            

$thisDateSQL=date("Y-m-d", strtotime($sub_row['DateSession']));

$this_time_from1 = date("H:i", strtotime($sub_row['TimeFromSession']));
$this_time_to1 = date("H:i", strtotime($sub_row['TimeToSession']));

$this_time_from_sql=$thisDateSQL." ".$this_time_from1.":00";
$this_time_to_sql=$thisDateSQL." ".$this_time_to1.":00";

$sum_hours = number_format(((strtotime($this_time_from_sql)-strtotime($this_time_from_sql))/60)/60, 2);

// Using the examples above this is doing the following:
2011-03-04 12:00:00 - 2011-03-04 10:00:00 = 2.00
2011-03-08 00:30:00 - 2011-03-08 23:30:00 = -23.00

I don't usually write an article on another site but I came across it and rather than just add it to my weblinks section, I thought I'd give it a little more credit.

"Motive is a web design and development agency based in Wellington, New Zealand providing consultation, website design, development and usability evaluation services."

Their website has initiated a Web Definition Glossary (there are others but this one's got that "kiwi" approach)