Bank of America has an online banking feature called My Portfolio.  If you've never used it before, it is basically a way to bring all your financial accounts together into one single view.  It gives you the ability to view at a quick glance your checking, savings, and credit card accounts even if they are all at different banks other than Bank of America.

With any solution that integrates information from multiple heterogeneous sources, there are bound to be problems and there are some with BoA's My Portfolio.  On at least 3 occassions in the last 3 months, various linked accounts I have setup in My Portfolio absolutely will not update for days at a time.  I am getting an error message that says my username or password is wrong.  I know this isn't the case because I've previously retyped them correctly and I can login to the website where my account is linked from with that username and password.

For whatever reason, the savings account which is held at another bank and setup in My Portfolio seems to flake out each time BoA has problems with My Portfolio.  We are currently on day 6 of the current "maintenance" period.  I use that term loosely, but that is the word BoA support uses when you call and ask about the problem which I've called about twice now in the last couple of days.  The standard response I keep getting is essentially this: "We are aware of some problems with the My Portfolio section of online banking.  We have a team working on it, but we do not have an estimated time that work will be completed."  Seriously, 6 days and counting?  If the purchasing application that I wrote for work recently wasn't working for 6 days, I wouldn't have a job any more.  How hard can it really be to debug and fix the problem?  And why not provide the users with a better error message instead of telling me my account's username and password is wrong when clearly it isn't?  They either don't have any user-interface designers on staff at BoA or the ones they do need to find another line of work.  Failure.

Anyone else think it is kind of ridiculous for a multi-billion dollar company like BoA to have these kinds of problems over and over again?  What do you think of the "error message" which really doesn't explain the actual problem to the user?

As I mentioned on my other website, I am working on a new techfuzz.com which will help me better maintain it and support some new features.  Here's a small preview of the forthcoming changes.

• SQL database backend
• Custom editor interface
• Support for multiple editors
• Support for multiple roles
• RSS

The database design is complete; although some minor changes are still being made.  I'm currently working on the custom editor interface which will implement the support for multiple editors and roles.  Offering RSS has been a goal for some time and when I designed the database I designed it with RSS in mind.  Part of the editor interface will also be designed with RSS in mind.

I expect these changes will take some time to fully implement, but I plan to roll out some of the new features as they are finished.  I don't have a particular date in mind.  It depends on when I have free time to work on the site and lately there hasn't been a whole lot of that for me.

I am fairly good at figuring out other people's code even if there is no written documentation or code comments.  Most often I can just follow the code to see what is happening and figure out where I need to make my changes.  Sometimes I have to run through the application a couple times while debugging to see what is going on before I can figure it out.  Eventually I do figure it all out... most times.

What I can't figure out is which code a developer last used when they make a dozen copies of the folders containing the code and don't indicate which one is the most current.  At least have the sense to DATE or VERSION the directories!  I am currently tasked with making some minor changes to an application that was written by a consultant 5 years ago.  The changes would be no problem if I could just figure out which directory contained the most recent code.  Before you suggest looking at the modified dates on the files, I already have.  The problem with modified dates is that they're not always correct.  You see, when you move files from a server to a SAN (Storage Area Network), the modified dates can get changed to the date the files were moved.

And now back to examing each file looking for the most current code...