The BileBlog

Surprise surprise, google release yet another half baked idea, and techies everywhere bend over and demand that the biggest black object in sight be crammed up their orifices so they can ooh and ahh and generally behave like a bunch of desperate teenagers aching for a fisting.

This time it’s google code, and I am astounded (though I should be used to this by now) that anyone in their right mind thinks that this is an improvement over anything equivalent that already exists.

Granted, it does have one tiny benefit over sourceforge, which is that you can access its source control and get up to date files. It’s far worse than every other project hosting facility there is out there in every other respect (java.net now offers svn, so the svn support is not such a differentiator anymore.)

What’s odd about this particular offering is that while google stuff is generally useless and good for eye candy, it’s usually reasonably well executed. In this case it seems like they just rounded up a bunch of apache hippie types and let them futz about with this idea just to stop them from damaging anything important.

For a start, there are some rather important features missing that make this repository, at best, a good backup solution and nothing else. There’s no file repository, so you’d have to go elsewhere to actually host your releases. In fact, there’s no release mechanism or notification support either, so even if you did by some miracle get some morons interested, you have no way of keeping them updated. The list of project users is also what you’d expect an intern to come up with; it’s just a list of logins, with no real names or any way of seeing who ‘flibbity.gibbet’ actually is, or any way of contacting said person.

Even more surprising, there isn’t a single innovative feature here. What’s so bad about having a nice searchbar at the top of the svn browsers, instead of the skanky faggotarse default apache svn view? Why can’t I use google pages to write docs? Why can’t it host my documentation for me and make it searchable via googlemagic?

Trying out this pile of worthless gunk reveals even more flaws. Really basic stuff that shows that Google apparently has a severe QA engineer shortage, or thinks that for trivial toys like this, it doesn’t matter if it’s halfassed. For example, if a project has ‘Apache License 2.0′ specified, the link doesn’t go to the 2.0 license, but to the generic Apache licenses page.

This sloppiness is prevalent throughout the app. For example, all ‘home page’ type links go to code.google.com, but nothing pointing to the hosting home, code.google.com/hosting. You’d have to go all the way to the top, then drill down to get to the main entry point.

The form validation is also bizarrely crap. On the project creation page, the create project button is disabled unless you have a description and summary > 3 characters. All good and well, but if your project name is just one char, that’s fine, the button is enabled. When you submit however, you’re told that the project name is too short. What’s so evil about having the same validation mechanism for all the fields? Maybe I’m a dimwitted user, but it’s not entirely intuitive to me that I MUST specify a summary and description, and that they must each be more than 3 characters long.

Of course, if you’re the kind of guy who likes to create dummy projects just to write bile entries about how much google sucks, then just use Safari. You can happily hit enter there and sneak in 2 character summaries if you so wish.

The issue tracker is somewhat interesting, I do like the freeform label support, but of course, for the sake of consistency with the rest of the app, it’s useless for any real world projects. There’s no way to add custom tags, so you can’t for example add tags for your specific versions. This of course means that for every single issues posted, the first comment you’ll get back from the developer is ‘err, so what version is this again?’

There’s also the issue of stupid defaulting in the issue tracker. I can click new issue, then click submit. There’s no detection for the default content being specified, so it’s very easy to spam a project with a ton of boilerplate issues.

Editing an issue is equally badly done, there’s a ‘Add a Comment and Make Changes’ title, but all that is under it is a ‘enter your comments’ textfield. Where’s the make changes bit? Ah, you click on the textfield, and the rest of the form magically appears! Yet more bad jarring UI.

All in all, an abysmal effort. Shame on you google, but the real blame here is for all the google fanboys who allow them to get away with such tawdry offerings. In any other company, this sort of half assed effort would never be released, and someone would be held accountable if it was. Maybe google developers pride themselves on not being in ‘that sort of company’, but in their place, I wouldn’t feel so smug about being so sloppy.

It’s pretty funny seeing an idea go horribly wrong. It’s even funnier when someone thinks ‘I can do that’, and totally ignore the fact that the marketspace they’re shooting for has room for just the one player, and that player is in that position not due to technical brilliance, hard work, a flashy interface, or even a particularly useful piece of functionality, but due more to sheer dumb luck.

Such is the relationship between InfoQ and TheServerSide. InfoQ’s idea is to basically take TSS, and make it usable, useful, and relevant. The end result? The deafening sound of a silent and mostly indifferent world.

There’s something pretty embarrassing about seeing entry after entry boasting that ignominious ‘0 comments’ stamp of shame. One might well wonder, what went wrong? Why does this site, to put it bluntly, suck so much ass?

There are a variety of reasons for this humiliating performance. The look of the site for example is too cartoony, but that’s just icing on the shitpile. The problem really is with the content. The top level subjects seem to be less ‘here’s what relevant to subset X of the IT landscape’ and more ‘here’s random stuff that’s better suited to blog categories’. As a potential user, I have no interest in Ruby or .net, but that’s fine, they’re at least alternatives to Java, so the domain space is at least similar. SOA and Agile though….omgwtfbbq. How do these relate to the other categories? The community divisions mean that an entry has to be either in SOA or Java, but not both. Nevermind that SOA is still a rampant cloudfest, which results in the hilarious but likely unintended consequence of all SOAP related entries being filed under SOA.

By far the worst culprit though is the Agile section. ‘Patterns for Daily Stand-up Meetings Published’ might sound like some kind of dirty joke you’d read about here, but sadly, it’s a real entry. The agile posts in fact are almost all about a prolific crowd that thrives on hunting out penises and gobbling up as much as possible. They’re in fact a set of genetic mutants, where any trace of a gag reflex has been long since eliminated. What next, ‘Agile sex in parking lots for TDD fuckstainwanktitshitnipplearsebandits’?

Even more hilarity of course can be found with the odd ‘oops’ moment. For example, they had posted the fact that ThoughtWanks is fucked, and owes VC’s a ton of money, then within a couple of minutes pulled the story. Later on that day they posted a rather biased piece about it from a ThoughtWanker instead. Just so you all know, ThoughtWorks DOES owe a fuckload of money, they obviously won’t be shut down due since nobody wins in that case, but it wouldn’t be surprising if a few top level people suddenly decided to leave to ‘focus on family’ or for the VC to add in more people that actually know how to get their money back. It’s pretty easy to hunt down an ex-TWer who has jumped ship and who’d happily reveal how much trouble they’re in.

TSS is where it is due to dumb luck, nothing more, nothing less. It happened to be the only venue at the time that served up content of that sort, and through some freak accident of nature, the average readership for some reason ended up with a few IQ points higher than JavaLobby. Poor InfoQ thought it was some kind of winning recipe, and proves day by day now it really, really, isn’t.