Day 18 - Website battle scars

Casey

I'm sitting here at my computer about an hour away from ending my Thursday workday. Today has been eventful day to say the least. George, who has been with us for 9 months, just returned from a 6 week stint back in England, Chris, a new Wokai intern from U Michigan started this morning and Li Guang, the junior developer on our website, joined us this afternoon to start working at the Wokai office today.

The website has been a major theme for me over the past few days. On Tuesday, we were supposed to do the second round of Alpha (bug) testing on the Wokai website. Four of us were going through test cases and looking for bugs on the site. What we were finding weren't bugs as much as features that were missing all over the site. After about an hour, it became clear to me that state of our site development hadn't yet reached the stage where we should be Alpha testing, instead, Ran Xin, Li Guang, and I should be finishing the development and then we should start Alpha testing. Over the course of a few minutes, I went from thinking we were two weeks into Alpha testing to realizing that we were two weeks away from starting Alpha testing.

[Imagine me frustrated...what's funny is when I went to search google images under "frustrated" a third of the images that came up had people throwing computers]

What's been confusing, and why I didn't realize this before, was that my tech mentors had been telling me that a site only has to be around 80% completed to start testing. What I didn't realize was that 80% has many meanings. We are definetly 80%, if not more more like 90%, done with the site, but, given the way that our developers are building the site, in which they're working on everything simultaneously, for us that means that every feature is still 10% away from actually working right.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that the process of finding all of the holes made us see how we could improve the logic and structure of the site, and now the programmers are grinding ahead. When we launch we'll have a much stronger site than we would have if we hadn't been continually rearchitecting our systems through the course of development and somehow we'll pull off a completed and bug tested site in time for live Beta testing next month. This is a great learning process, I'm sure future developments will seem like a breeze compared to building the site from scratch, but man, is this frustrating.

Comments

[Helen Han]

Dear Ms. Casey Wilson and Ms. Courtney McColgan,

My name is Helen Han, and I am currently a 3rd-year undergraduate student at Harvard University, pursuing a B.A. in Applied Math/Economics. During this year, I am taking a year off to do some personal research relating to economic development in China and came across the Wokai website. After exploring Wokai's website some more, I was fascinated by the organization and feel very passionate about the possibility of contributing through working at Wokai.

I actually immigrated with my family from China to the U.S. when I was eleven years old; since then, I have always been intensely interested in working in the financial sector. After participating in the China Synergy Program last summer, I realized through the research and travels we did during the CSP program that China's microfinance sector is in such need of improvement. I am passionate about improving China's economic conditions, starting with the less privileged parts of the country, and I feel that Wokai would be the perfect opportunity for me to contribute.

I have attached my resume and a cover letter for your review. If possible, I would be honored to discuss with you my passion for Wokai's goals and how I can contribute my abilities at Wokai.

I have emailed my resume and cover letter to [email protected] for your review. Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Helen Han
Harvard College
Class of 2010
Applied Math/Economics