And so it begins….
Posted on July 11, 2007 by Tim
Filed Under Project Ninja |
In 1995, the code that powered the Interactive Investor site was originally cut. Most of it has changed since of course; but equally much of the code that exists today is tightly knit in to the legacy of more than a decade’s worth of development. A decade that has seen over 50 developers / engineers / HTML gurus and designers leave their mark on www.iii.co.uk in one way or another.
Deciding that the risk and resource requirements of rewriting the site/s (we have several white-labels) from the ground up is going to offer longer term benefits is an inevitable point that most development teams reach after several years of supporting code they wrote (or didn’t write). Lessons are learnt; development frameworks and technologies mature; and users have increasing expectations. For me, it was a no brainer. If we don’t evolve then we won’t compete. Simple.
Today marks the official start of project ‘Ninja’ - the phased rewrite of interactive investor from the ground up. A strange project name that I’ll expand on in the future, but basically involves us focussing as much resource as possible to new development whilst maintaining the existing maintenance responsibilities we have to our users, the business and revenue lines.
No small task for a relatively small team.
It will involve the help of the open source community; our friends (ex-colleagues) such as Paul Duncan and Mike Smith who continue to provide support around code they wrote and development I just know they want to be involved in (iii.co.uk never leaves your blood it seems); and of course our users - for whom we are building the site after all. Information on our beta group will follow soon.
Since this is the blog’s first post, the blog will also be used for feedback and to provide further information about our subscription service - Quotestream (Level 2) , which we very much see as work in progress with much more to come. My colleague Paul Erasmus, head of community, will run this category.
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