Rob Ricci reviewed FastLane by Thomas J. Misa
Interesting look behind the curtain
4 stars
This book is an interesting look at the process that produced the FastLane grant administration system that was in use at NSF for over 20 years. The authors did an admirable job interviewing hundreds of people, getting details about how it was designed, developed, received by the user community, etc.
A few interesting tidbits that I learned: * The first review submitted via FastLane was a few months before the first purchase made on Amazon - so it was in fact quite the pioneering system (and then proceeded to change very little for what is essentially eternity in Internet time - I liked to call it "the finest in Web 0.2 Technology" and in fact that wasn't all the wrong) * The book credits FastLane as a major force moving academia towards PDF as a file format, since it required it; apparently a very large fraction of the problems with …
This book is an interesting look at the process that produced the FastLane grant administration system that was in use at NSF for over 20 years. The authors did an admirable job interviewing hundreds of people, getting details about how it was designed, developed, received by the user community, etc.
A few interesting tidbits that I learned: * The first review submitted via FastLane was a few months before the first purchase made on Amazon - so it was in fact quite the pioneering system (and then proceeded to change very little for what is essentially eternity in Internet time - I liked to call it "the finest in Web 0.2 Technology" and in fact that wasn't all the wrong) * The book credits FastLane as a major force moving academia towards PDF as a file format, since it required it; apparently a very large fraction of the problems with it had to do with the fact that in 2000, it was very hard to create PDFs and/or you had to have a licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat and/or Distiller. * There was some amount of contact between the team developing FastLane and the team developing Mosaic/Netscape (the first web browser), so in some ways FastLane actually helped shape the web itself. * A large chunk of it was originally written in Perl. Because of course it was. And that part was later re-written in Java. Because of course it was. * It was pretty interesting to see other sides of the system, such as the post-award administration bits and eJacket (the part used internally at NSF). The organization basically screwed up and developed the external-facing parts from a separate pot of money than the internal-facing parts, and as a result eJacket was 5-10 years behind and for a long time stuff submitted to FastLane got printed out on paper for internal circulation. * The book was far, far, too kind to the Interactive Panel System - yes, it did add some interactivity that used to be hard but it's implementation was and still is hot garbage that deserves to be cast into the fires of Mount Doom.
If you interacted a lot with FastLane or interact much with 'NSF, you might find this an entertaining read.