A couple of weeks ago I was corresponding with @wvengen, a free software developer from the Netherlands who has been using TKLDev to package Foodsoft into a ready-to-use Foodsoft in a box solution that can be easily deployed to manage your own non-profit Food Coop.

Recently I've been looking into a powerful but complex web application technology we're considering using in future versions of the Hub.

The problem: how do we update a browser view when a background process updates the database?

A few examples of places in the Hub where this comes up...

In a nutshell, think of your users.

They read top to bottom. They have a very limited attention span. Even if they read all the way through, they're probably going to pay more attention to things that come early. Before patience runs thin.

So your goal is not only to describe changes but to figure out now to communicate as much value to users before they lose interest. If you do a really good job, you might actually prevent them from losing interest and they'll read all the way through. Don't bet on it though...

I was in the middle of developing a new feature for the TurnKey Hub when I received a bug report that needed to be fixed.

What to do? Throw away my current changes? Checkout a clean branch? Of course not! Just stash my changes away, fix the bug, and get my changes back so I can continue development.