custom development

I have a confession to make. I'm absolutely terrible at making estimates. No matter how long I think something is going to take, it always takes longer. Even if I double, triple, or even quadruple my original guess.

And it's hurting my business. Why? Because I do everything I can to deliver what I promised. And I end up losing money, instead of making money. Instead of renegotiating with the client, I work nights, weekends, and pay my employees out of my own pocket to deliver. I go months without a paycheck, rarely get a day off. Does that sound like any way to run a business?

There are basically 3 models for getting web applications built:

• Proprietary platform
• Custom code
• Open Source
  

At Freelock, we're big fans of the Dojo Toolkit. It's a Javascript library for providing data-backed widgets in web applications, on-the-fly graphing, animations, and much more. As we move more of our web applications to the browser, we keep pushing the edge of what's available, and sometimes hit bugs in Dojo itself. So as I mentioned in a previous post, I often find myself teetering between the most recent stable releases and the tip of Dojo development. And I think we have the best way of managing these changes of anyone.

So once more, development on an internal project hit a stumbling block. The latest release of Dojo, 1.3.1, has some bug fixes I'd like to use, and in general I like to keep my main project working with the newest dojo releases. But 1.3.1 introduced a new security constraint that basically escaped all the html that I was showing in a grid control. Suddenly, instead of rich text, I get HTML markup!!!