I find code re-use extremely useful when applied appropriately. Like eating ice cream it needs to done in moderation and too much of a good thing is no good at all. A best-practice for one project might not be the best-practice for another. Implementing MVC on a banner ad will do nothing more than waste time and money. However, importing a bandwidth tester you

On the other hand is the reality of my particular industry which is not interested in paying for the upfront dev for a framework-even if you explain to them the cost later on they are okay with it as it’s a project based money structure so that could very well be pulled from next years budget. My clients tend to have about a 4 month view out. Add to that- working with multiple customers who have their on ‘standards’ and your last paragraph is basically gospel.

It really is a niche industry where flash has grown a unique ecosystem. It is a compromise to speed some things up with code structures and still allow the animators tools in flash to get the job done with keyframes and code spread out on an organized timeline. I’ve yet to be able to get a flex project pushed through-if we did more corporate business processes type of jobs it might happen.

In relation to getting different groups to work together- we constantly have to work at having our SME’s and multimedia/programmers try to understand the other’s ‘reality’. It’s hard but incredibly important and can really help a project be successful.

I hope your job goes well and welcome to the detroit area.

-ethan

All too often I hear about a negatively perceived engineering group, when said people are all very talented and positive; they just don’t realize the best ways to work with eachother. That’s totally understandable when you barely have enough time to catch your breath, let alone ‘fix a process’.

One thing I try to espouse to designers is if they can re-use interface elements, it means the engineering team only has to create those parts 1 time. That means less development time for a larger portion of the site, and less debugging time. That then gives the designers more negotiating room to get some of the more challenging & ground breaking features they sometimes don’t get to have implemented.

Lastly, I still have yet to see the point of re-usable code. Base classes? Sure. Like, everything is dynamically driven at a lot of places I’ve seen. This allows the client to change content on a whim and not have to spend a dime on the design firm since it pulls this information in dynamically anyway; they just have internal IT change a text file, or modify some DB table.

However, the View’s are pretty much fodder. Yeah, a compact UIComponent is nice, but a List for example changes so much between projects, I fail to see the point. Again, there are a lot of good base classes that you can use every project, but even the word ‘class’ is hard to justify sometimes. It’s a tough industry for a traditional programmer to work in, I’ll give it that.