Learning to be a Notes developer the hard way
By now, you may know I’ve had my first Notes application actually deployed on our internal network, for my colleagues in Techline to help them manage the steady flow of incoming RFP requests from Sales Reps, Partners and Clients. What you may not know is that yours truly has had a crash course in what NOT to forget when developping even the simplest Notes applications. Here is that list, for you to laugh at me or pick up a tip or two (not mutually exclusive):
- Always make yourself Manager of the database (don’t laugh)
- Always make the users Authors, if they need to manage their own documents (now, you may laugh)
- If you make the users Authors, do NOT forget to add an author field to each form (yeah, this is pathetic, I know)
- It helps if you create a distribution list of your users, before deploying, so you can reach them quickly for announcements, like, «Hey, I screwed up in the app, please don’t all email-flame me at once…»
I’m probably too ashamed to admit the other mistakes, so don’t ask… Hey, it’s not that I’m a bad guy – I work hard, I put in the long hours, and I don’t make the same mistake twice – but, there’s no substitute for experience, as they say. And this experience is hitting home allright…
Ok, back to work (and reading the Domino Designer 6 Redbook‘s Security Chapter) and waiting for the next wave of complaints to come in…
P.S. I also take this occasion to say hi to Ed Brill as well, who’s blog I’ve been reading for a long while!
