This week while reading Michael Hall's blog post about 1.0 being the deadliest milestone I couldn't help but grin when I read,
1.0 isn’t the milestone of success, it’s the crossing of the Rubicon, the point where drastic change becomes inevitable. It’s the milestone where the old code, with all it’s faults, dies, and out of it is born a new codebase.
This was exactly the thought that crossed my mind when I first heard about the Clock Reboot at the Malta Sprint.
Let me share how Clock Reboot came to be :). At the start of the Malta sprint I was told that the Clock app would receive some new designs that would need to be implemented for the Release-To-Manufacture milestone (RTM) which at that time was 4 months away. And on the eve of the meeting, we (Canonical Community team and the Core Apps team) rush into the meeting room where you see Giorgio Venturi, John Lea, Benjamin Keyser, Mark Shuttleworth, and other department heads looking over the designs.
Giorgio goes over the presentation and explains how they are supposed to work. At the end of the presentation, I am asked if this is feasible within the given timeframe and everyone starts to look at me. Honestly, at the moment I felt a shiver run down my spine. I was uncertain given that it took the clock app almost a year to buckle down and get to a point where it was useable and I wondered if the 4 months time was sufficient.
Strangely enough, during the presentation I recollected a conversation I had with Kyle Nitzsche a few days before that meeting, where he asked if the clock app code changes started to stabilize (no invasive code changes) considering we are this close to RTM.
Fast-forwarding to today, I think that the Clock Reboot was a blessing in disguise. I have been working on the clock app since the beginning which was somewhere in the first quarter of 2013. And I can confidently say that I have made a ton of mistakes in the so called 1.0 milestone. The Clock Reboot gave me the opportunity to start from scratch and carefully iterate every piece of code going into the trunk while avoiding the mistakes from the past.
And I like to think that it has resulted in the codebase being much more clean, lean and manageable and in a more reliable clock experience for the user.
The Music App is going through that same transition and I wish them the best since and I think it will make them stronger and better.
I like to end this blog with a blast from the past since it is a one year anniversay for the clock app! ;) It was first released to the Ubuntu Touch store on the 10th of October 2013.
