Its Saturday and I'm in the office still pushing towards beta. We're doing migration at the moment from an eleven year old site, Gamespot. The stuff from the early days is a bit messy and that's what I'm dealing with at the moment. I run a long job, watch it go and wait for something that breaks the rules then adjust my understanding of the rules and start all over again.

Eleven years is too long to go on a codebase where no one from the original days is still around to maintain it, keeping it clean and enforcing standards and methodologies. With new people coming in, knowledge of the system is fragmented and different understandings of it lead to inconstancies when developers make changes or add features. Its easy to see from the outside as well; just take a look at Gamespot right now and note the vast inconstancies in user experience. I don't need to point them out.

I spend most of my time on Giant Bomb so when I go to the live Gamespot site for something I often cringe. I don't know what the code looks like and I don't wanna know. The new Gamespot will be based on the Giant Bomb codebase. The Giant Bomb code is clean and easy to understand. I starting working with it and understanding it almost immediately.

The current dev team is a mix of new people, including myself. Many newish people who started around the time when Giant Bomb was rewritten and there's a few who've been here for a while. Its a really solid team and I'm really happy to be working with these people. I really think we've got a solid code and engineering base to bring Gamespot as well as Giant Bomb and Comic Vine to whole new levels. Once we get Gamespot out on the new platform and ditch the old site that is.

Oh, I'll definitely continue the nodeJS bit when I can focus better. As I write this I'm watching three consoles looking for alerts or other bad things...