Marked As Pertinent

I’m taking a trip to Pasadena between August 4th and August 5th.

I presented at Dev Nation Portland last weekend. These are my slides:

The question seems pretty obvious, “Who should be writing the acceptance tests for your software?” I think most people will first answer with “Programmers!”. There might be a few “testers”‘ maybe even a “the customer and programer pair”. These are all fine answers. Unfortunately, I’m starting to think they are wrong.

You are doing BDD right? So you already care about the “b” word: behavior. You care enough to differentiate yourself from the lowly TDD-ers. I’ve got news for you, there is a whole group of folks that care even more about behavior than you do. These people are called Interaction Designers and you probably don’t have one on your team. Don’t get me wrong, everyone that has ever written software has done interaction design, you probably weren’t conscious of it, or if you were, you probably did it poorly (unless you’re an interaction designer, and then you probably don’t read my blog).

Just who is doing IDx in your organization is easy to figure out. When you write a spec, you know, those “it should. . . “, “When” and “Then” statements, who fills in the blank? I’d guess it’s usually the developer (that’s been the case every where I have worked). Sometimes you might ask the customer, product designer, product owner, project manager, designer, or someone else on your team. However, this is where I think we’re doing it wrong. I’m starting to get the feeling that the person that should be filling in these blanks should be the interaction designer (ID). IDs are the people that know your users, they know what your users want, what they need, and what their end goal is. They know where your users sit when they use your app. They know what time of day they use it, they know if they are bored or tired or in a hurry. And most of all, they know what “it should” do and they are right. Do you know this stuff? Do you care? I’ve worked with programmers that were offended to even be in meetings where we talked about personas and end users!

I was recently involved in a little experiment we called “Agile Up To Here” which was (among other things) a 1 week agile bootcamp for Alan Cooper. You might recognize that name if you have ever heard of interaction design because Alan invented the term. He’s written a couple books on the subject, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum and About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Anyway, after looking back at the week, I was trying to figure out what we could have done better. We were really agile. We could deploy from day 1, we had CI, we tested the shit out of everything, we paired all the time, we had the customer (Alan) in the room and on the team, it was sweet. But there was still something wrong.

Duh. We had an interaction designer in the room but he wasn’t thinking about IDx, he was learning agile. So who decided what went after “it should” in our app? Programmers, the worse-case choice. And what happened? On Friday, our last day, one of Alan’s IDs paired with Elizabeth Hendrickson and they finally started doing some real interaction design. But it was already too late, the damage was done. We had Interaction Design Debt™.

But why do you need IDx? The job of an ID is to figure out what a user wants to accomplish and the to ensure the application does precisely that. Anything your app does that doesn’t go to this need is waste, and any compromises are mistakes. Programmers, and I say this as someone who has almost solely as a programmer for the last 3-4 years, should be focused solely on figuring out the simplest code that could possibly work and implementing just that. The person that figures out “what could possibly work”, however, should be the ID. This must be a tight loop, and it must take place day in and day out.

Programmers are typically terrible at weighing the needs of the user against all the other things they have to keep in mind. If you don’t believe me, you’re either delusional or a programmer. Which is precisely the problem. This is something most people don’t know they don’t know. Or they don’t know they are actually pretty bad at it. Visual designers can also be pretty bad at IDx. If your designer just hands over Photoshop files with no instructions of how things should behave, thats probably because they are a bad interaction designer.

“Business people” are also usually bad at it, but for almost the opposite reason. Typically I’ve noticed that business people (which usually includes marketing folks) fall into 2 categories. Either they are too solution focused “let’s do it like so and so” without thinking if that’s actually the way it should be done for their users, or they don’t actually care about the implementation. The first group are doing IDx poorly and the second group doesn’t want to write specs. They don’t want to work at the level of thinking required for IDx and programming. They have a business goal. Let’s say it’s that they “want users to be able to sign up for a newsletter”. That’s the level they want to work at. The way the “user does the sign up”, “What happens when they click the “sign up” button?”, “What is written on the button?”, “Does the user have to confirm their sign up?”, and all the 100′s of questions that go along with this feature isn’t the level that most business people want to be involved. And when that is the case, why would  you want them to be involved in writing ATDD tests? If the answer is “because they are the ones that can answer that question” then you’re falling into the same trap that me and a lot of programmers have fallen into, because that just isn’t true. You’re actually looking for an interaction designer, not a business person.

Now that I’ve, I hope, changed your mind about just who should be writing these “tests”, let me get into the part that I’m not quite so confident about. Maybe what I’m talking about shouldn’t actually be expressed as “acceptance tests”. I mean, what happens and what a users sees when they sign up for a newsletter may not really be “business rules” or “business logic”, but isn’t it just as or more important? It’s important enough to me that I’d like to test it and make sure that what I think my code is doing is actually doing what I think it should. In fact, in most of my experience, these types of things are usually much more important and a much larger part of the application than the “business logic”. If you look at something like Facebook, where is there any business logic in that application (is there even any business, I don’t know)? I guess there could be some  in the privacy/permissions area. However, wouldn’t you want to test the multitude of things that happens when someone “likes” something? An interaction designer should be specifying what happens and a developer needs a way to be sure that their code does just that. What do we call those tests? How should we be doing that testing?

[Paraphrasing] There are lots of things we don’t know that we don’t know about [the project we were working on]. Agile is how we optimize our process for learning those things. – Ward Cunningham

One of the things that really changed how I thought about building software was learning about the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I didn’t know that’s what I was called, mind you, but I certainly had witnessed it and once it was explained, it made perfect sense. What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?

“people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”  - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect

What does that have to do with Agile? Well, some of the seeds for Agile, at least from Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham’s influence came from the days when those two guys shared a lab and were partners in R&D at Tektronix. I’ve written about this before, but basically, their job was to come up with, every set period of time, some idea that Tektronix should pay a team of guys to develop out into a product or tool. So, KB and WC would come into work every morning and one of them would propose an idea and they would spend the morning trying to hack the idea into working software. If it wasn’t working, they’d go back to working on whatever was the last best idea, and then at the end of the time period, they always had something that worked that they could turn over as an idea. This is where some of the seeds of TDD, iteration, and other ideas that are now staples of Agile came from.

But why would you do that? Why would you essentially start over every morning? Well, as it turns out, humans are really bad at knowing what they don’t know. So why not come up with an idea and just work on that idea until you had something? Let’s explore that. . .

BDUF is for those that don’t understand the Dunning-Kruger Effect

I don’t feel like this is a very controversial topic (that might also be the other end of the K-D Effect) because I think this one has already won out. It certainly has in the ruby community. I’ll go ahead an explain it though. BDUF stands for “Big Design Up Front” and most non-enterprisy, non-corporate software teams know, you can’t design all of your code before you write your code. And the agilists out there will even say that the only way to write truly simple clean code is to write a test first. I hope this isn’t a big shock to anyone. If we examine why this is true, we pretty quickly get to a point where you say “we don’t know enough about the code to design the code without first writing some code”. In other words, we don’t know what we don’t know about the code yet, we have to learn what we don’t know and adapt our application architecture as we learn. I guess if you get a CS degree, you’ll run up against a whole set of folks that don’t believe this, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that most of those folks also don’t write much software. Anyway, suffice to say, we’ve got a whole set of practices, red-green-refactor, continuous integration and deployment, to optimize against doing BDUF (among other things, surely).

Specification Documents are for those that don’t understand the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Another example (I think more important and less widely accepted, and the real reason I wrote this post) of the optimization for all the “things you don’t know that you don’t know” in Agile is that we don’t write spec docs. We don’t start out a project with a giant document that spells out everything we’re going to build. That’s not to say no one knows what we’re building, or has a vision of what it looks like when it’s done, au-con-trair, that’s definite a recipe for disaster (and, I think, most people’s biggest fear that haven’t participated in an Agile project). We spend the time to write all of this down in whatever format we would need to give it to a developer and walk away. Why? Well it’s that damn Dunning-Kruger effect. You *can’t* actually write a good spec, and not only that, those that don’t know this are the ones that precisely think it’s possible. No matter how many lines of code you’ve written, or UI’s you’ve designed, or businesses you’ve started, you will never know enough about what you don’t know to write a document that will cover every edge case, angle, possibility, challenge and decision that has to be made to successfully create quality software.

I hear this lot when I tell people this: “But you can change your spec” or “Good specs allow for learning”. I’m sure you can and I’m sure they do. Change and learning is precisely what agile is all about and not just embracing change, but optimizing for it. You’re *always* going to change that spec. Every project I’ve ever been on, at one point or another, something was too hard or expensive to be worth it and we’ve always changed what we’re going to do. Most of the time, this something was a surprise. It wasn’t what we thought would be hard or even something we thought we needed to do! I’ll even go further to say that some of the more successful projects I’ve been on, not only did we optimize for learning things early, we optimized for being able to change things easily.

The problem with writing a spec and then changing it, however, is that usually this renders part of the spec useless, or worse yet, it renders useless some “real work” you have already done. There’s a million quips and anecdotes people use for this, “Fail fast. . .”,  ”If you’re not embarrassed when you launch your project, you waited too long”, etc. The reason people say these things is precisely because they’ve experienced the Dunning-Kruger effect. They’ve written a spec or built software thinking they had their bases covered, that they knew things, but they didn’t end up knowing everything and not all of what they thought they knew ended up being true. And many of these people have come to the conclusion that if they would have done less planning, and got to implementing even faster, they would have learned important information that they didn’t know they didn’t know earlier and saved themselves work. XP is about optimizing for this in a technical setting, “The Lean Startup” is about optimizing for this in a marketing and product development setting.

Since the weather was so wonderful here in Portland today, my wife and I decided to make fajitas for dinner. Instead of your regular “grill some chicken, fry some veggies” fajitas, I decided to do a version I saw Alton Brown do on good eats.

The interesting thing here is that I’m cooking the meat (skirt steak) directly on the charcoal. No grill, no foil, no pan, just meat directly to red hot glowing chunk charcoal. This develops and intensely smokey flavor in the meat. You can see there are large areas of “burnt” meat, but it’s not actually burnt, it’s just caramelized and full of flavor. I’ve never had skirt steak so tasty, very caveman, in a good way.

When the steak was done (3 minutes per side, don’t even think about touching it while it cooks, and then let it rest 15 minutes), I put a cast iron skillet directly on to the coals and let it get smoking hot. I put the standard white onion and green/red pepper that I drizzled with a little olive oil and salt and pepper. The skillet was so hot the veggies instantly started to caramelize and you have to stir them almost constantly or you will get a little burning. Cooking the veggies takes less than 5 minutes (definately don’t over cook them) and the flavor is also amazing. If you ever wonder why veggies take so much better in good chinese food, it’s because they cook them super super hot like this. As a side note, if you want to make really great stir fry and don’t have a really nice gas wok stove, this is actually a good way to do it.

Enjoy with a Cascadian Black Ale and plenty of guacamole, preferably on your beautiful patio with your bride.

I’m taking a trip to Baltimore between June 7th and June 11th.

#railsconf

I started writing code in Flash 5. I actually learned OOP in ActionScript, but that’s another post all together. My point is, my first code editor was Flash. Then I moved to Dreamweaver + Homesite. Then I used BBEdit for a while. Then I found Rails and Textmate and I was in love. I’ve never done Java or ASP so I had no need for an IDE, or so I thought.

Anyway, about 6-8 months ago, I looked into Rubymine. I knew Pivotal Labs used Jetbrain’s IdeaJ IDE with a ruby plugin for a long time, so I thought a Rails specific version might be pretty interesting. I’ve used it full time, every day, since I tried it out and I really love it. I find it super productive and it has all the tools that I use my development flow all in one app.

First of all, I’ll state for the record that Rubymine is not a text editor. I still use Textmate every day. You won’t open up random files in Rubymine to edit them. Second, I don’t edit CSS in Rubymine. I use CSSEdit from MacRabbit. So I have no idea how it does with CSS. I also don’t really use Rubymine on my laptop. Most of the win I get from Rubymine is that it’s SUPER efficient

Here’s what my Rubymine setup looks like:

Things to note:

1. Close the file browser and use split windows. Get rid of the toolbar, you don’t need that.
2. Open up the Run tab on the bottom and move that out to a different window. Then fire up a Rails console and it will be out in that window also. Move this window over to your other monitor (stop reading if you don’t have one, you’re dead to me) and make the editor full screen.
3. If you open up the preferences go to Editor => Editor Tabs and check “Show Tabs in a single row”
4. I’ll leave this up to the reader, but figuring out how to get Spork up and running is all kinds of win.
5. I use a modified version of the Mavenlink theme. I’m using Menlo in 14pt and 1.4 line spacing for my font.
6. I have loads of my own tab expansions, which are called Live Templates in Rubymine. (‘%=’ + tab outputs <%=  %>). The default ones are lacking, I should package some of mine up, but since I created tons of my own in Textmate, most won’t make sense to you. Suffice to say, I don’t like haml, I like erb + live templates. That’s how many I have.

My favorite Rubymine features:

1. Command + B with your cursor on any Ruby/Rails method will take you to where that method is defined. This is way better than any documentation because I CAN READ RUBY CODE. I have been known to write out code just to command+b it and remember if it’s the method I want.
2. Control + H on any Ruby/Rails method shows you inline documentation. Win.
3. Control + Spacebar in .feature files will let you ‘live complete’ Cucumber scenarios you’ve already written, including the substitution regex in them. If you don’t understand how much win this is, I can’t help you.
4. Refactor => Rename is fucking awesome. Rubymine 2.0.2 will even rename “some_message” in SomeModel.should_receive(:some_message). Rubymine is pretty smart about this stuff, and when it isn’t they’ll fix it (I requested the should_receive stuff and they made it happen).
5. Item #4 reminds me of my favorite feature over all. Jetbrains is actively developing Rubymine, so if you have a feature request, or you find a bug, or something annoys you, THEY WILL FIX IT. I don’t know about you, but I am morally against Textmate at this point because I don’t think the creator is working on it anymore. He won’t open source it though, because it still makes him money (and I’ve heard the internals are a nightmare). Rubymine’s developers use Cucumber to test it, and I think I even heard they use Rubymine to build Rubymine. They are committed to the product, to making it better, and to listening to the Rails community. I’m willing to bet, if the community were to put it’s weight behind it, we’d see even greater support.

My gripes:

1. Rubymine is buggy. It just is. But I’m over it. They’ll fix them. If you find a bug in Textmate (like I don’t know, search), you’re never going to see a fix. Never.
2. Rubymine will sometimes need to re-index your project. This usually isn’t convenient, but if you want all those cool features I just spoke about, and search that’s fast, and lots of the other things that make Rubymine awesome, then suck it up and take it. You need a break anyway.
3. Rubymine can’t keep up with Yehuda. That’s just the facts. Rubymine has to know alot about Rails, Gems, Bundler, Cucumber, etc and changes in all those underlying libraries will sometimes make it painful to upgrade them and have Rubymine’s awesome features. That’s just life in the fast paced world. Having said that, Rubymine does a GREAT job trying to keep up. For example, it already supports bundler 0.7. Rubymine 2.0.2 will support bundler 0.8 and most of Rails 3.0. It’s got support for haml and sass and spork and lots of cutting edge stuff. And again, they are actively keeping it up to date (can I mention that enough?!?).
4. Rubymine is a resource hog, but then again, it’s not like I have a lot of other stuff going on my laptop, so it’s not usually a big deal. Also, I’m sure others see this more as I have a SSD drive and it makes this not a big deal.

Chris Bailey prompted me to write this post, and he’s got some stuff on his post about Rubymine I’d like to clear up:

Doesn’t work (well) with MacOS X Spaces – prevents switching to another space when you select another app

I have no idea if this is true or not. I don’t use Spaces, sorry. However, I will say, I don’t switch away from the app much through out the day. Also, submit a bug! They’ll fix it if they can.

File tabs:

• They go to multiple rows too easily.
• They just don’t look right/good.  I’m not sure if it’s because they’re non-native tabs or what.
• I understand, but don’t like how the rows swap when you change to a different tabs.  You lose track of where a file is in the tabs.

I address this above, but I’ll re-iterate. Making tabs into a single line in the preferences will make Rubymine majorly better.

Find in project is nowhere near as fast, or presented as usefully as Ack in Project for TextMate.  It does provide more options, such as filtering files by directory or type and so on, but the speed is generally far more important.

This is puzzling because I have found find to be very fast. And yes, it has MASSIVELY more and better options than Textmate. I haven’t used Ack in project much, so I can’t comment.

Also seems to crash enough that it bothers me.  I can tolerate an occasional crash, although with TextMate I’ve run it for weeks on end with no crash, using it constantly.  I’ve had several either hangs or crashes with RubyMine in the short couple weeks I’ve been trying it out.

I know Pat Maddox has seen his share of crashes. I never see crashes. I don’t know why, but Rubymine is actually more stable for me than Textmate. Even on big projects.

The refactoring bits were just ok.  This is a really hard feature in general though.  Simple refactorings I used, like renaming a method worked fine.  But, changing the name of a model class did about 1/4 of the work needed and was questionable as to whether it was an advantage over just doing it all myself.  It got all the obvious, low-hanging fruit, but it seemed to completely ignore Rails helpers and views.  It misses a bunch of things that I’m not surprised at of course, such as table names in SQL conditions (e.g. in named_scopes), model name used anywhere in JavaScript or CSS (which isn’t uncommon in Rails code), and then the one that I’d like to see it do a better job on, but that is hard of course is on associations.  So, in my application, I was refactoring our “Deal” model to be “HotelDeal”.  We have a “Hotel” model and it has_many deals.  Thus in the code you’d routinely see things like “hotel.deals” to reference that association.  It didn’t handle any of those.  Not surprising, but starts to devalue the refactoring feature.

I’d submit bugs for these things. Also, I don’t know what version Chris was using, but this stuff has been getting better with recent versions.

At the end of the day, there are probably specialized tools that do each of the things that Rubymine does just a little bit better. GitX is definitely a better git/diff reader. Textmate is better for just plain editing files. CSSEdit is better for CSS. Terminal is a better shell. But for me, being able to have all of these things in one tool, and the few Rails specific things that Rubymine does provide, make up for the small things it doesn’t get right. If you give Rubymine 10 minutes, I’m sure you’ll always go back to what you were using before. However I gave Rubymine a month, and now that it’s 8-9 months later, I wouldn’t ever consider going back to Textmate.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t want to be negative. I am only writing this because I feel it deserves attention by the community and because I love Rails so much that the fact that something is making me lose faith in it truly makes me a little sad.

I first started using Bundler 0.7.6 in December ’09 in a Rails 2.3.5 project. We also use Bundler (not sure what version we started with) in our main Rails 2.3.x app that powers www.Goldstar.com. In the 3+ months that we have been using bundler, it has, by far, been the largest pain point and time sink of any part of our toolset to the point that today, I proclaimed on twitter, than in it’s current state, I can’t recommend Rails 3.0 to anyone starting or upgrading a product.

Now, if you know me, you know that this is pretty out-of-left-field. I’m a HUGE Rails evangelist. And I truly believe that it’s right for many projects in all kinds of scenarios.

Anyway, on to the fail. . .

Bundler 0.7.x had lots of issues, too numerous to count. However, it did have the option to pass a yaml file to it via –build-options that would allow you to pass a few arguments into the various gems it needed to build. This was good enough for us, and we followed the convention we use with database.yml to have all the correct options in the various environments we use to dev/deploy our rails apps.

Builder 0.8 soon followed suit (I believe in January) and messed us up by changing the path inside the bundler folder that all the gems where kept at to be name-spaced to what version of ruby you were using. I’m not sure what this was meant to fix, but it broke a few things for us and it broke Rubymine (my personal editor of choice). But hey, we upgraded.

I’m going to leave out all the pain that was causes by upgrading to 0.8 and just say that we are currently using Bundler 0.8 in dev and production, except that a bug, where older version of already cached gems won’t upgrade unless you rm -rf the bundler directory (json-pure-1.2.2 to json-pure-1.2.4 fwiw) is breaking our deploys to production. This means that every deploy to production, we can’t be sure the bug isn’t going to break it, so we must rebuild every gem in the app (of which there are MANY) every time we deploy. This just isn’t going to work for us.

Now, we’d like to move to Bundler 0.9 because it promises to fix our issue (bundle install correctly updates gems as required). However, –build-options has been removed from 0.9. Because –build-options was removed, bundler has moved to a don’t-vendor-some-of-your-gems solution where it will use gems from the system if they aren’t in the bundle. This allows you to pass different incantations to `gem install` for different gems (mysql, pg, etc) and it will use those already built gems when you later do `bundle install`. But that means we’re back to managing gem installs on all of our different systems in different ways, which was one of the few things that Bundler did significantly better than config.gem!

Our systems developer, Steven Baker, is currently working on re-implimenting a solution to the –build-options issue, which he first ran by “Carlhuda” in hopes that they might include it and we’re not going down a road that will just end in us playing by ourselves and having to re-impliment our Gemfile or build_options.yml file for whatever solution is, but this brings me to my point:

Rails 3.0, because it relies on Bundler, is not in anyway stable/useable/suggested unless you want to pretty continuously fix/re-impliment/cry yourself to sleep because of Bundler. Carl L. has posted a roadmap which shows at least 2 more revisions as well as closing 20+ currently open issues. I have no idea what the issue velocity is on the project, but to me, it looks like it’s in the months and not days or weeks before Bundler is going to be stable. And, as with every version before it, there have been major downsides to the implementation, that have forced pretty major breaking changes. In other words, every version of bundler is a new experiment (not to mention the various gem management techniques that merb used which were also a source of headaches), and I have little confidence that just slapping 0.9 or 0.10 is going to change that.

Bottom line: A significant piece of Rails 3 is still in the “spike” phase, and shows little to no promise that it will become solid enough to trust for _months_.

Please skip the “Patches are accepted” (we’re working on one kthxbye) and “Why are you even using bundler?” (troll). I’m not here to indict or blame anyone, just to report our experience and clarify why I’ve lost significant confidence in Rails because numerous people have asked.

Sidenote: I’m putting this at the bottom, because it’s secondary to the point of the post, but why, precisely, do we *have* to use Bundler to make Rails 3 work? Who made this decision? If it was the same people that wrote Bundler, doesn’t anyone see a problem with that (NIH)? I’m assuming there were discussions in the rails-high-council private campfire room at some point, but obviously us peons aren’t privy to those. Config.gem wasn’t the easiest thing to use, but I’ve successfully used it for close to a year with very few issues and had it’s eccentricities worked out pretty well. To have it completely removed from Rails 3, and replaced by an experiment, seems a bit premature.

Found another example. Charts/Graphs!

I can’t, in any way, tell which of those lines belong to which label. They both look green to me.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to do really great front end development (HTML, Javascript, CSS). And, one of the key issues things I keep hitting upon is writing “scaleable” front end code. I use the word scaleable in a couple ways:

1. Writing code well in a way that you could keep adding developers and they could each increase productivity linearly.
2. Writing code that will work for increasingly larger sites.
3. Writing code that is maintainable, testable, and extendable.

I know others have thought about this, some people call it “best practices”, some people call it frameworks, Yahoo even went as far as to create the YUI family of libraries. I think deep down, most people were trying to think about how to “scale” whatever it was they were doing.  This entry is the first in a series of writing jQuery code that “scales”.

Another thing I probably need to address before we get started is “Shu”. It comes from the Japanese phrase “Shuhari“, which I learned from Alistair Cockburn and is common in the Agile circles, and “describes the stages of learning to mastery”. Once you’re aware that there are certain levels of mastery of something, you start asking yourself which level you’re at and what level others are.

JQuery is awesome, and I love it. For along time, I treated javascript as a 2nd class citizen, but I’ve recently been really digging into it and making it “scaleable”.

In Dan Cederholm’s recent book, he introduces some jQuery that I’m lumping into the “Shu” box (ba-da ching!).

$(document).ready(function(){
$("#loc-adv a").click(function(){
$("#map").slideToggle("slow");
return false;
});
});

Now don’t get me wrong, this code is perfectly acceptable, especially for the situation it’s presented in (a small, static site, built by 1-2 developers). I’m all for not complicating things if they don’t need to be. This code is the simplest thing that could possibly work, and that’s awesome. However, we’re talking about scaling javascript up to larger sites, more developers, and maintainable in legacy applications, and there are some things about this code which don’t make it very scaleable.

First, it’s not really re-useable. Sure, you could include it in any page that has the `#loc-adv` a link and a map, and it’s going to work, but what if  you needed multiple maps in one page or had multiple links. All of a sudden, you’re going to need to repeat yourself, and we don’t do that.

Second, if you put this right in your page, as it’s presented in the book, you can’t use it on other pages without repeating yourself. Maintaining this code could be painful if you put it in more than one page.

Third, the only way this code is going to fire is if you click the link. There’s no way to call it from other code, or test it, and you’ll have to attach it to multiple elements if you add another link or some other element that needs to reveal the map.

What if you want to link to the page with the map open? This code won’t account for that.

I’m not going to address all these issues in this post. I’m going to leave that up for the “Ha” and “Ri” posts. Look for them in a couple days.