Charge!
Things at work have been just dandy the last week. Last Friday, we had a two or three hour freak-out meeting about the project that I’m working on. Apparently, the IT department at our client has a completely different idea where we’re going with this project. As a result, talking about how to exchange data has been more of an issue than thought. Once the client’s business people realized this, they called and our people had to suddenly have a meeting. As a result, people from my company will be flying to Virginia to demo what we have and get things worked out.
I guess I’m glad that I haven’t been the requirement collector at this point. I’d feel kind of silly if I had been. I’ve just programmed what I’ve been told. Now, the project has been running behind as I’ve had about a thousand other things come up in the last few months, but I’ve been able to make really decent progress in the last week. Before that, even, I’d been able to delegate some of the more isolated projects out so there has definitely been progress, albeit not as much as I would have liked at this point, either.
My coworker and I have been coding like mad all week to get this project moving in a good direction. Part of the slow start is that we’ve decided to use Cold Fusion’s object oriented model to manage most database transactions, so if I make an object and use it’s setters to set different fields and then call the save function, the object is either inserted or updated, depending on the object’s status. There are several benefits here. One is that there’s no difference between inserting and updating. Another benefit is that once one person has done all of the strange SQL for specialized deletes or formatting of some value, all instances of that method call take advantage of it.
At the moment, there is still no way to update just one value in a table, but I think I know how to fix that. The really nice thing is that all of these database objects are inheriting from a common object, so once the parent object is modified, it’s available to everyone (and, of course, everyone can override it, keeping a common API for simple database stuff.
This is still our first try with this sort of thing at work, so I’m sure that there will be some lessons learned here, but like I told the my coworker when I requested that we handle repetitive stuff this way, we won’t know until we try. So far, he’s really digging this whole idea, so I’m glad that I have him on board and not begrudgingly doing the work.
So we had this meeting last Friday. I was told what they needed from me for next week’s demo, and my coworker was told the same. We were both on track to finish these today. When we arrived, there was an e-mail with a lot more stuff that was requested for the demo. The demo is Tuesday and this is the first that we’ve heard of needing these things for it. Our direction on Friday was very, very clear. I made sure to ask on mine, because I was trying not to have requirements pop up at the last minute. Yeah, that didn’t work. As a result, I was planning on working this weekend.
The message did say that some things could be mock ups, but I think that mock up to the message writer means something completely different than to me. To me, a mock up means that it is at least pulling live data and maybe not doing anything with it. To the message writer, I think it means to literally just hard code some fake data in. Why spend the time to hard code in all of that data only to find out later that actually putting the data in those places is a lot harder and won’t work? I guess I just like to have a good plan in those situations.
At 4:30 p.m. this afternoon, we are asked if we could come in at ten in the morning to go through the demo that they are going to do. We agreed, but I told the people asking that as I was planning to work this weekend on things that they wanted for the demo that it would not all be done, but that we could go through what was done and talk about what wasn’t if they liked. So now I probably get to go in in the morning and spend two hours going through stuff when I could be working on the requirements that were dropped on us this morning.
The scary part that’s left undone has a lot to do with work flow and job statuses. I have a vague idea how to do it, but I’m afraid that I’ll miss something. We’re talking in the morning about it, no doubt. Charge forward, I guess.
I don’t want to work this weekend.