If it ain't broke, fix it anyways!

"In search of Excellence" by Tom Peters is one of the few books that I first read over 15 years ago that I keep revisiting from time to time to glean nuggets of inspiration*.

One of the mantras that I've gained from his insights is, "If it ain't broke, fix it anyways". It's a mantra that I've been putting to use since starting at Finextra Heights over a year ago. Change is good. It keeps you fresh and on your toes.

The following is a quick update on what the Finextra web team are up to.

One of the big changes that the web team has been, and still is, undertaking is to convert all our legacy Classic ASP, procedurally-based code to much more streamlined & re-useable OOP ASP.Net. There's a lot more work to do but we've been chipping away at the old pages & links bit by bit. Some of the pages that we've updated are ones that users will rarely ever click on such as the copyright page but need to be updated. Many of the changes are so subtle that you'd be hard pressed to notice any difference from the old pages i.e. the new job page.

Other changes have been more mission critical and highlight how vast finextra has grown. Earlier in the week some users had trouble viewing our RSS feeds; the reason for this was due, in part, to legacy code written by a developer long since departed to the server room in the sky. He'd used a small data-type of type "CInt" instead of the larger "CLng" so earlier this week when we'd reached our 32, 769th Press Release some parts of the Finextra code-base encountered issues. I think this goes to show the popularity of Finextra - we've published nearly 33000 press releases since December 2003, it also goes to show that the mantra, "If it ain't broke, fix it anyways" definitely applies here too - as code that was written maybe even only a year ago that was fit for purpose then, may not be fit for purpose now with the changing needs of business. Even more so in the current economic climate.

You may have noticed earlier this week that we included some video ads for a client. If you were using any browser other than Firefox you will have seen these ads displayed correctly on the page 100% of the time. Firefox users may have noticed that (very) occasionally the ads would jump position to other parts of the page. The web team were pulling their hair out with this issue (benedictine monks now have more hair than our web team!). Eventually we stumbled upon a little known bug in Firefox and we rectified (actually worked around) this issue. It just goes to show that, even though we may have great systems in place, external factors could mean that if it ain't broke, you still need to fix it anyways.

So hats off to the web team. As ever great work!

*The other book being Watchmen by Alan Moore.