Solo Technology

Today was a pretty typical day as a jack-of-all-trades coder.

Wake up early, log on to all the production boxes and make sure jobs all ran last night and everything is up and happy. I usually get to this at some point between 5:30 and 6:30 each morning — typically closer to 5:45 or 6. Look over the process managers, decide if I like memory and cpu loads.

Jump through the shower and head into the office. My drive recently tripled, but really, it is still pretty short compared to other places I’ve lived. 30 miles just isn’t that rough when traffic cooperates.

Spend part of the morning reviewing my project plan for the current primary project, updating tasks and monitoring dates. Sent a few dunning and reminder emails about things I’m missing.

Take 10 minutes and see how the DR servers are coming along. Extend to 20 minutes as a demo ensues, but looks like we have the db cheerfully syncing.

Sized up a new task that was added late last week. Looked like a db table and a couple of ASP pages, so figured two days, tops, to code and thoroughly unit test it.

Back to the project plan to wedge this task in. Oops… I have to be done coding at the end of this week! But nuts, I’m still waiting on some stuff from various sources so… well, ok — set myself to 200% on the tasks this week to get it all done. What the heck, I didn’t do 80+ last week and I felt downright… slothful normal. Ok, saddle back up, Tex.

Take off the coder hat, put on the Jr. Lawyer hat and write an internal defense/rebuttal to the latest “slam” from a client. The joys of being a vendor — signing that contract gets you the right to be titled as “those dorks” or “them idiots” by somebody at the client site. Same old stuff just about everywhere — although the more mature shops don’t tend to take that attitude. Teaming with the client sure seems to get more done then lobbing each other the bus and wasting time writing up defenses, but what do I know?

Somewhere in there I nuked lunch and ate it at my desk. I think.

Jump on a daily conference call to talk about QA testing. Things seem to be going well there as far as I can tell. One big show-stopper bug on my plate. Pity that I get different emails than the tester when I try and replicate it! Doh. That needs to be looked into, and soon. Take a couple minutes and talk about some other testing that needs to be sorted out before we’re 2 days from launch (yeah, I can play CYA, too).

Ok, wade into today’s task. Realize I’ve done stuff just like this recently and look over that code. Oh heck, no way is this gonna take 2 days! Sweet! I’ll get back on top of the schedule. By 5pm it’s all pretty much there. Well, almost… This combo-box is WAY too wide. Hmm… ok, I can set the width of it so it displays at a narrower width, but when you click on it you see it at full width. Excellent. Oh wait. That only seems to work in Firefox. In IE and Opera, when you click you see at the narrow width. Well crap, that’s fugly and useless. And, from there until 7:30, the progress was lost while I tried to make it look decent. Alas.

I’ll sort it tomorrow I reckon.

Day 5 sans nicotine and removed no heads from bodies.

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