Work and Side Projects
Work has been busy again. Absurd timelines and requests. I'm not sure what went wrong, but looking back it feels like we all dropped the ball on this project for the first month of the project, and the project needed to be completed in a little over a month and a half, at least an initial alpha release did. Given that the project was to write to an entire application from scratch in that time frame which was constrained by our framework decisions, it was nothing short of a nightmare.
With the ball having been dropped, it meant a little more than 2 weeks of serious development. That part went well but I worked on a the weekend a bit and had a few late nights. After that we had a little more than 1 week for a more serious beta delivery, again a stupidly rushed time frame for what they wanted. Some more of my weekends gone and more late nights and that went over well. Now I have less than a week to complete a beta worthy of installing on a customer machine, will probably mean some more late nights, but should be doable as most of the screens are done in a beta capacity already.
And after that they want a public release by the end of April. Basically, an entire project in 2 months (3 if you count the month where it seems like nothing got done). I won't dive into specifics, but the application will touch data that will eventually be used for accounting purposes, so I would consider even 6 months an inadequate time frame given the severity of screwing up the data.
The entire time I'm continually asked if I need more people to help me. I'm losing my mind. Honestly, the project isn't huge. There are not a lot of screens and there isn't a lot of functionality. What has been consuming the most time has actually been co-ordinating efforts and getting everyone on the same page. So, the one thing that adding more people would actually make worse. Even though we have so few screens, the reason it has taken this long (at least one major reason) is that people keep requiring changes to the database design. And the database is shared across projects. The changes are as a result that we didn't fully understand the scope and design at the outset, or that different people interpreted the scope differently.
I never thought I would enjoy a management position. And maybe I still wouldn't. I would actually kind of like to have a permanent consulting position. I could save this and probably many other companies a ton of time, money and headaches if they would just listen to me. But I'll save that for another time.
Onto Tony's application. Going good, looks like he is slowly getting ready to use it. We went over it 2 weeks ago and decided I needed to add the ability to track the odometer in and out. I had the invoice setup to display it if populated but had nowhere to set it. So now the initial reading can be added in the Work Order editing screens, and the user is prompted for the final mileage when the order is closed.
Also needed to configure the invoice to display the exemption # if it was provided.
I think the next thing is something Tony hasn't asked for yet which is to configure a default print and add automatically print the invoice at predetermined times. Right now we've been testing it in my parents dining room where there is no printer. But having to manually request the invoices I think will quickly become an irritant.
Have been slacking on the blog because I bought an IPad which has taken away from my laptop computing. I actually like the on screen keyboard, but not for posts of this length. The novelty effect is wearing off and now I'm using it more casually, which I hope will translate into more work going into code and blog.
With the ball having been dropped, it meant a little more than 2 weeks of serious development. That part went well but I worked on a the weekend a bit and had a few late nights. After that we had a little more than 1 week for a more serious beta delivery, again a stupidly rushed time frame for what they wanted. Some more of my weekends gone and more late nights and that went over well. Now I have less than a week to complete a beta worthy of installing on a customer machine, will probably mean some more late nights, but should be doable as most of the screens are done in a beta capacity already.
And after that they want a public release by the end of April. Basically, an entire project in 2 months (3 if you count the month where it seems like nothing got done). I won't dive into specifics, but the application will touch data that will eventually be used for accounting purposes, so I would consider even 6 months an inadequate time frame given the severity of screwing up the data.
The entire time I'm continually asked if I need more people to help me. I'm losing my mind. Honestly, the project isn't huge. There are not a lot of screens and there isn't a lot of functionality. What has been consuming the most time has actually been co-ordinating efforts and getting everyone on the same page. So, the one thing that adding more people would actually make worse. Even though we have so few screens, the reason it has taken this long (at least one major reason) is that people keep requiring changes to the database design. And the database is shared across projects. The changes are as a result that we didn't fully understand the scope and design at the outset, or that different people interpreted the scope differently.
I never thought I would enjoy a management position. And maybe I still wouldn't. I would actually kind of like to have a permanent consulting position. I could save this and probably many other companies a ton of time, money and headaches if they would just listen to me. But I'll save that for another time.
Onto Tony's application. Going good, looks like he is slowly getting ready to use it. We went over it 2 weeks ago and decided I needed to add the ability to track the odometer in and out. I had the invoice setup to display it if populated but had nowhere to set it. So now the initial reading can be added in the Work Order editing screens, and the user is prompted for the final mileage when the order is closed.
Also needed to configure the invoice to display the exemption # if it was provided.
I think the next thing is something Tony hasn't asked for yet which is to configure a default print and add automatically print the invoice at predetermined times. Right now we've been testing it in my parents dining room where there is no printer. But having to manually request the invoices I think will quickly become an irritant.
Have been slacking on the blog because I bought an IPad which has taken away from my laptop computing. I actually like the on screen keyboard, but not for posts of this length. The novelty effect is wearing off and now I'm using it more casually, which I hope will translate into more work going into code and blog.
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