Front side whore

We're in a busy period at the moment. We're getting a lot of work in, which is good. A lot of the work is subject to a rather strict delivery schedule, which is also good.

Deadline work doesn't bother me anymore. It used to, but I see each new "must be done by Thursday" ( never launch on a Friday :D ) effort as an opportunity for further refinement of the front-side craft. Things get tightened up. Potentially better approaches are explored, and normally, successfully implemented. The continued rollout of successive developments feeds into that in a big way. As a coder and web evangelist, I'm pretty much on an interminable mission to get quicker, better and more productive.

Thing is, I'm hating developing new content management features right now. We developed our CMS a year ago, and it has been used to launch shitloads of sites in the interim. My boss loves it, the clients love it, but personally, I really can't stand it any more.

The problem largely lies in the fact that I look around it, and see my current knowledge minus one year. I can't really change too much about it, as it's pretty established and importantly, working. For the moment, I'm stuck with it - but we've really got to get a new one in the bag - if only for my own sanity.

As a consequence, I've started to see front-side development as my only outlet for true innovation and progression. The two sites we launched last week have been performant, bug-free and vindication for the techniques we used to produce them.

Content management is going to change. Has to change. Yet I don't want to end up supporting legacy stuff any more than I really have to. As such, we're going to need a unified approach that'll address past, present and future needs. Sounds difficult, but solving the problem of everything is precisely the sort of challenge I need to make content management interesting again.