For the non-IT folks out there that complain about the Unemployment System not working let me just add my 2 cents. System capacity isn't like a garbage can, if you need more capacity you can't just go to any store and buy a larger one. Most systems are custom built and built for a single detailed purpose, so we do our best to build them for a given capacity PLUS a given excess. If garbage cans don't work think of your gas tank, you don't have a 200 gallon gas tank in your car even though you typically only need 16 gallons for the normal 2 week period. To pay for more capacity then you typically would expect to use or an educated guess would tell you might be needed in an emergency would be foolish and a waste of money.
For anyone who doesn't follow the details of the news conference the last time the unemployment system was hit hard previous to COVID-19 was 9/11 and after that they increased it's capacity to handle roughly double that traffic.
Seemed like a reasonable assumption that things would never be worse than a double 9/11. So flash forward to today and the system is handling almost 3x what planned for in that educated estimate. The system is handling 10x the normally daily volume, often time processing more than a week of normal application volume in a single day and over a month of normal application volume in a week.
As an IT specialist for the state that isn't involved in the project directly I can tell you every developer and system admin is dedicated and take the systems performance very personally. I've been in their shoes before with other systems and you feel like it's your child and it's letting people down. It's gut wrenching and the thing that keeps you up at night wondering what you could have done and what you should do now to fix the problem. When the underlying issue is that there isn't always a quick fix for these types of problems and the timeline for the real solution will likely take longer than the reason for the problem in the first place.
I know there are those of you suffering and trying to stay afloat and all the IT staff I'm sure share my sentiment that we are doing all we can for you. You are our friends, our family and our neighbors we take pride in servicing with you and share in your struggles. All of this was said not to pacify you or to excuse the performance but rather to let you know that your voices are heard and we are working on making things better.
Friday, May 15, 2020
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
The power of preview
Throughout our hunt for a replacement CMS for SharePoint it appears that we may have been spoiled and not known it, further more it appears we've created dependencies on that spoiling to the point that we can't think of how to work without it. It turns out sometimes you don't know how good you have it until you're forced to try something else and realize that your old beat up car had some killer features that new cars don't have today.
I mean think about it, you're old 80's junker had an ash tray! Did you smoke? Maybe/maybe not, but regardless I bet you probably used that ashtray for loose change more than you ever did for ashes. Cars today don't have ash trays, so where am I supposed to keep my change? I could use the cup holder for it, but then when i put my soda down it jingles or doesn't sit right. So yes, There are alternatives for how to do things but they aren't as good as the original.
When I first started working with SharePoint I often asked why we needed to go through an Approval cycle for documents, images and pages. Now I've decided files and images, yeah approval for those is somewhat very niche (versioning yes but approval not so much), but pages ohhh has "draft" status ever been helpful. The usefulness of being able to make a change and the user see exactly how that change will appear once it's published to the world, now that's POWER! We can make entire sites look different and the anonymous public will never know until the user gives us the magic "OK" and then we publish and the whole world sees a massive change at once.
I know in previous blog entries I talked about "headless CMS" and the concept that data and visualization should be separate, but the fact is we care about how things look so being able to "preview" how something is going to look before hitting that magic "publish" button is HIGHLY useful. Furthermore being able to do that and not have to have double the resources just to enable you to have a full mirror system for "content development" only to then redo your work in as the separate PROD environment is a huge maintenance and cost saver. Not to mention the ability to make quick turn around changes to non-critical content items.
So preview is an important piece of the process but it goes beyond being able to preview what data will look like in different visualizations stand-alone, you have to be able to view those different forms within the context of the final product. For example, lets say you have a article collection. If I add an article I should be able to see what that article will look like in the roll up, on the article detail page, in a slider (if thats an option), etc... and I should be able to see those "previews" with the rest of the current page content around it. Because viewing one listing item not within the context of the others doesn't give an appreciation for how it will actually look. Nor does seeing the article without the site styling or header and footer applied to it.
Most content editors are visual and they want to know exactly how something is going to look to the visitor, so give them that capability. If people didn't care about how the final output looked then we wouldn't have LCD screens on our digital cameras where we can review photos before we decide to keep/print them or not. Remember how life was back in the real film days? Don't make your website become a "surprise" roll of 35mm where you're not sure if the pictures are gallery worthy or if you have 36 closeups of your thumb.
I mean think about it, you're old 80's junker had an ash tray! Did you smoke? Maybe/maybe not, but regardless I bet you probably used that ashtray for loose change more than you ever did for ashes. Cars today don't have ash trays, so where am I supposed to keep my change? I could use the cup holder for it, but then when i put my soda down it jingles or doesn't sit right. So yes, There are alternatives for how to do things but they aren't as good as the original.
When I first started working with SharePoint I often asked why we needed to go through an Approval cycle for documents, images and pages. Now I've decided files and images, yeah approval for those is somewhat very niche (versioning yes but approval not so much), but pages ohhh has "draft" status ever been helpful. The usefulness of being able to make a change and the user see exactly how that change will appear once it's published to the world, now that's POWER! We can make entire sites look different and the anonymous public will never know until the user gives us the magic "OK" and then we publish and the whole world sees a massive change at once.
I know in previous blog entries I talked about "headless CMS" and the concept that data and visualization should be separate, but the fact is we care about how things look so being able to "preview" how something is going to look before hitting that magic "publish" button is HIGHLY useful. Furthermore being able to do that and not have to have double the resources just to enable you to have a full mirror system for "content development" only to then redo your work in as the separate PROD environment is a huge maintenance and cost saver. Not to mention the ability to make quick turn around changes to non-critical content items.
So preview is an important piece of the process but it goes beyond being able to preview what data will look like in different visualizations stand-alone, you have to be able to view those different forms within the context of the final product. For example, lets say you have a article collection. If I add an article I should be able to see what that article will look like in the roll up, on the article detail page, in a slider (if thats an option), etc... and I should be able to see those "previews" with the rest of the current page content around it. Because viewing one listing item not within the context of the others doesn't give an appreciation for how it will actually look. Nor does seeing the article without the site styling or header and footer applied to it.
Most content editors are visual and they want to know exactly how something is going to look to the visitor, so give them that capability. If people didn't care about how the final output looked then we wouldn't have LCD screens on our digital cameras where we can review photos before we decide to keep/print them or not. Remember how life was back in the real film days? Don't make your website become a "surprise" roll of 35mm where you're not sure if the pictures are gallery worthy or if you have 36 closeups of your thumb.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)