Back in January, the folks at the Community Software Lab were asked by a university-based non-profit if we could translate an artist's Photoshop mock-up into HTML and CSS. Eager to please (and needing some money to keep the budget balanced), we said "sure" and submitted our estimate for 20 hours of work. It's March, and we're still working. What's the deal?

For my part, I gratefully ignored things until the last week of February, content to let Dan, my boss, manage the project. He had subcontracted the work to Erich, our soon-to-be VISTA, and for the most part, let things be, receiving changes from Erich every few days. It worked great--as long as changes didn't need to be made immediately. Erich put together some pretty good code and certainly earned his 20 hours' paycheck. Then things began to pick up.