Comments on: What if you don’t believe in your Project? http://life.billeisenhauer.com/2004/08/16/what-if-you-dont-believe-in-your-project/ Just another WordPress weblog Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:32:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.4 by: Mike http://life.billeisenhauer.com/2004/08/16/what-if-you-dont-believe-in-your-project/#comment-12 Wed, 18 Aug 2004 06:17:58 +0000 http://life.billeisenhauer.com/2004/08/16/what-if-you-dont-believe-in-your-project/#comment-12 At a previous company of mine (who shall remain nameless), we did NOT do a good job of 'closing the loop' on email addresses. Therefore, while the registration process was easy, and there were tons of registrants, all the info we'd gathered was next to useless, since the email addresses (and other data) were not guaranteed to be valid. That being said, allowing duplicate email addresses is stupid. An email validation loop (which forces the registrant to click a link in an email sent by the system) is a well-known process for ensuring that a given registrant has given a good email address. If the email address was that important, this is likely the process that should be used (as I'm sure you are painfully aware). The best story of crazy projects from my past is how we were forced to implement "export compliance". While Oracle and other vendors managed to get by with a "I'm not a terrorist" checkbox on their registration screens, our legal dept had a better idea: we had to pass registration data (and CHANGES to registration data), in real time, to an external vendor's web service to determine whether the registration data represented a bad guy set to do evil with our product. Of course, there was a complicated workflow and problem resolution process, and of course, the external vendor turned out not to be super-reliable, and of course, it performed poorly and blew marketing's SLAa, and of course, we put in a property to allow this to be disabled when the inevitable happened. It goes on and on. At a previous company of mine (who shall remain nameless), we did NOT do a good job of ‘closing the loop’ on email addresses. Therefore, while the registration process was easy, and there were tons of registrants, all the info we’d gathered was next to useless, since the email addresses (and other data) were not guaranteed to be valid. That being said, allowing duplicate email addresses is stupid.

An email validation loop (which forces the registrant to click a link in an email sent by the system) is a well-known process for ensuring that a given registrant has given a good email address. If the email address was that important, this is likely the process that should be used (as I’m sure you are painfully aware).

The best story of crazy projects from my past is how we were forced to implement “export compliance”. While Oracle and other vendors managed to get by with a “I’m not a terrorist” checkbox on their registration screens, our legal dept had a better idea: we had to pass registration data (and CHANGES to registration data), in real time, to an external vendor’s web service to determine whether the registration data represented a bad guy set to do evil with our product. Of course, there was a complicated workflow and problem resolution process, and of course, the external vendor turned out not to be super-reliable, and of course, it performed poorly and blew marketing’s SLAa, and of course, we put in a property to allow this to be disabled when the inevitable happened.

It goes on and on.

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