4 ms·

My expert advice is, Don't do it, unless you can buy the exact system off the shelf, and allocate the budget to run and support it. If you can't, stick with the

My expert advice is, Don't do it, unless you can buy the exact system off the shelf, and allocate the budget to run and support it. If you can't, stick with the crappy legacy system you have. Building actual software for actual use cases for actual people is extremely hard, and a lot harder than it feels like when you're just a few visionaries with an itch talking about these things. I'll say it again, slowly. It is EXTREMELY hard. Sure, you can probably get a couple of enthusiasts together and build an infinitely better 80% solution in Ruby on Rails over a weekend, but you will learn the hard way just how important those last 20% are. That unpleasant senior teacher that never liked you? He uses a feature in those 20% and he's friendly with the principal and the union rep, and before you know it, you're up to 3am, not building awesome solutions for the entire school, but building bespoke solutions to that guy's convoluted backwards workflows that barely made sense in the 70s when he came up with them -- and you don't have the political capital to tell him to shut up and get with the program, however warranted that message would be. If you do pull through, your reward will be a pat on the back, and a lifetime of being on 24h call. Oh, and that's your best case scenario. There's a high risk of not actually achieving a system that is substantially better than the legacy system, even in the 80% case. And a substantial risk of introducing a subtle bug that screws up grading at the worst possible time (you know, how an administrator pulls a transcript giving an A+ student a B- average and sends it to his prospective college, screwing up his future, and the error is only caught after the deadline, and it's all literally, personally your fault). To pull this off, you need a team, a budget AND hard executive sponsorship. That sounds unlikely for a public high school. If you think you have the vision and the domain knowledge, and the technical chops to pull this off (but no budget and/or no executive cover), your best bet might be something like YC: fix this problem for ALL schools.

fsloth 11y ago
"If you think you have the vision and the domain knowledge, and the technical chops to pull this off (but no budget and/or no executive cover), your best bet might be something like YC: fix this problem for ALL schools." Also - more often than not connections and domain knowledge seem to be more important for success than pure technical chops if the solution to the problem is more about tailoring existing technologies to a domain rather than implementing technically novel things.
deleted 11y ago
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guai898 11y ago
I totally agree. School is a complicated environment. There is a reason that legacy system survives so long. It is extremely difficult to introduce new solution into public school. There are regulations and many stack holders. Just don't do it.
crdb 11y ago
Spot on. (Been there done that, saving your excellent comment for future "let's rewrite this" situations.) Also summarised well here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I'd only add: - nitpicking, but with Ruby on Rails, you'd probably use ActiveRecords (the ORM) to manage the data; by not enforcing constraints in the database itself, you'll get a tiny bit of orphaned data. Fine for an e-commerce website where customer service can send a voucher; sucks for the few students whose life is affected by your non-provably-correct solution. - most non-technical users (most of the teachers I know included) confuse good and pretty UI. "Bad" legacy system usually means "not flat design/doesn't look like my iPad". This usually pairs with the idea that "it would just be a simple app, we can get it done for a grand".
kabdib 11y ago
"No good deed goes unpunished." Take heed. It took me years to understand this . . . > To pull this off, you need a team, a budget AND hard executive sponsorship. That sounds unlikely for a public high school. Also be prepared to fend off the professional magpies who will undermine you. "Why aren't you buying an Oracle solution? Their sales folks were in here just yesterday, and they can do all this and more. Most of it is already built in to PeopleSoft." And at that point you either whip out your snickersnee, gird your loins and leap with joy into the political fracas, or (just guessing you're not the type who's a joy-leaper into political bottle battles) you back away slowly, make popcorn and watch events unfurl. It'll be ghastly, and unless you execute an evasion plan you'll wind up editing fucked up XML configuration files and hating, just hating yourself for opening your big fat mouth, and hoping that there really is a hellmouth located under the school. Right there. Under that CD of PeopleSoft. What could be worse?

fsloth 11y ago

"If you think you have the vision and the domain knowledge, and the technical chops to pull this off (but no budget and/or no executive cover), your best bet might be something like YC: fix this problem for ALL schools." Also - more often than not connections and domain knowledge seem to be more important for success than pure technical chops if the solution to the problem is more about tailoring existing technologies to a domain rather than implementing technically novel things.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

guai898 11y ago

I totally agree. School is a complicated environment. There is a reason that legacy system survives so long. It is extremely difficult to introduce new solution into public school. There are regulations and many stack holders. Just don't do it.

crdb 11y ago

Spot on. (Been there done that, saving your excellent comment for future "let's rewrite this" situations.) Also summarised well here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I'd only add: - nitpicking, but with Ruby on Rails, you'd probably use ActiveRecords (the ORM) to manage the data; by not enforcing constraints in the database itself, you'll get a tiny bit of orphaned data. Fine for an e-commerce website where customer service can send a voucher; sucks for the few students whose life is affected by your non-provably-correct solution. - most non-technical users (most of the teachers I know included) confuse good and pretty UI. "Bad" legacy system usually means "not flat design/doesn't look like my iPad". This usually pairs with the idea that "it would just be a simple app, we can get it done for a grand".

kabdib 11y ago

"No good deed goes unpunished." Take heed. It took me years to understand this . . . > To pull this off, you need a team, a budget AND hard executive sponsorship. That sounds unlikely for a public high school. Also be prepared to fend off the professional magpies who will undermine you. "Why aren't you buying an Oracle solution? Their sales folks were in here just yesterday, and they can do all this and more. Most of it is already built in to PeopleSoft." And at that point you either whip out your snickersnee, gird your loins and leap with joy into the political fracas, or (just guessing you're not the type who's a joy-leaper into political bottle battles) you back away slowly, make popcorn and watch events unfurl. It'll be ghastly, and unless you execute an evasion plan you'll wind up editing fucked up XML configuration files and hating, just hating yourself for opening your big fat mouth, and hoping that there really is a hellmouth located under the school. Right there. Under that CD of PeopleSoft. What could be worse?