The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'a street filled with spring flowers.'
Spring is in full force here in Minneapolis. Flowers are starting to bloom and sidewalk seating areas are becoming crowded. In my own life, new growth is happening both personally and professionally. With this new growth comes new challenges, which I'm navigating as best I can.
After being single for a decade, I'm now in a serious relationship. This is great, but I'm still getting used to having another human actually care about my feelings. It's forcing me to get clear about what exactly my feelings are and where they come from. I'm seeing this as an opportunity, and trying to work through whatever moments of discomfort arise.
Professionally, I've been invited to take a more active role in shaping the website I work for. We're currently designing a new homepage and plan to use what we come up with to eventually update the whole site. So far it's looking good. I'm confident that the end result will be awesome. But some parts of the process are giving me pause.
The site itself is a sprawling, unstructured affair. There are tens of thousands of pages spread across hundreds of folders. The content pages are all done with inline styling, so changing the whole look/feel of the site is far from a simple prospect. It could probably be done with !important css or some insane find/replace, but neither option seems ideal.
A few years ago, I showed the site's files to a couple of top-notch developers and both suggested starting over from scratch instead of trying to update the existing code base. In light of this, the plan a colleague and I are developing for transitioning the site to a new look/feel would involve gradually building a new site with the new look, migrating content to the new pages over a period of months to years, and keeping the existing site as-is in perpetuity so existing readers can continue to access the info they're used to in the format they're used to.
Complicating matters, the existing site was built by just one person, who opposes the plan. When presented with the latest iteration of our design for the new homepage that was 90% coded, he refused to even consider working on the code to get it to 100%, insisting instead on recoding the page from scratch. He also said that he'd have to recode anything we gave him from scratch, because making pages mobile-friendly has to be done in a very particular way that only he can do.
Recently I learned that this person bills our org $170/hr for his time and claims that this is an industry standard rate. Maybe I misheard and it's only $70/hr, which would make more sense. I hope I misheard. Either way, I feel like he's set up a situation where he's the only one who can work on the site, at a high cost to the org. That's not sustainable, especially for such a big site. All of this makes me uneasy. The most sensible course of action is probably to just finish the homepage design and then strongly recommend seeking outside expertise regarding the larger site upgrade.
One way or another, this will work itself out. And unlike in the past, I'm resolved not to worry too much about it. Part of my job is to investigate issues and make recommendations, so that's where my focus is. I'll say my piece, but leave the rest for management to deal with.
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