consumers

the first project I worked on, was a semi-governmental consumer oriented but public-service type of service that had no ambition of achieving anything beyond mediocre in terms of customer experience.

the second project I worked on, was a corporate no-b.s. site that let professionals do their daily tasks.

since yesterday though, I'm on a consumer project. the client has about a million customers, and their aim is to extract maximum value from those, while getting some new ones in, and not letting the existing ones slip away. it turns out that this is a fascinating scenario.

the marketing people devising their plans and the web service are currently in isolation. the web service only supports a fraction of services currently offered. what is interesting, is how the ability to control your own service palette on the web will affect the way customers buy the products and services. when transaction costs go down, and there's price elasticity, it should follow that people will buy more stuff.

not just more stuff but in new ways as well. in a million people, who in this case, are a fairly large cross section of the general population, there's a large heterogeneity of behaviors. for the people higher up, there's a lot of stuff to think about. putting the marketing and the web service together will help fasten the flow of information and shorten iterations. how much value could be added if the ultra complex product stuff was simplified so that it would be optimal for sales in the web channel. time to market etc.

folding

while we are waiting for a scala ide and java7's properties, people on my team are using strange optimizations to reduce the verbosity of java code. for one thing, using final nowhere makes code terse, another thing is using default visibility for fields. handy, but then eclipse's automatic tools for finding unused fields dont work anymore.

my suggestion then is an editor which adds finals and privates everywhere, and maybe even parantheses and such, and then folds them from view. automatic tools work, local variables which can be final, are, and can therefore be used in inner classes, but the code is less verbose.