(no subject)
A whole month without a post... oops. Sorry about that.
It's been a busy and stressful month.
My big project at work went live on monday 2 weeks ago. There was frantic coding to try to get it ready before launch, which became an effort to get it ready enough before launch, then patching things up as we go along with all the staff using it. Several 11 hour days, and much stress and panic ensued. It's (pretty much) all up and running now, and all looks positive. The teachers are really liking it, and the admin staff are... helping us improve the system by finding lots of new features for us to add and bugs to fix. Even they seem very positive about the whole thing though, which bodes well for me asking the big boss for a pay rise.
Mike (my co-coder) has been doing a lot better of late. He's managed to take several of the things brought to our attention and fix them pretty autonomously. I still feel there are some gaps in his understanding, but at least that keeps my role as lead developer nice and secure.
Talking with Spencer (my brother-in-law, and assistant head-master at ... Swanmore school I think) yesterday reinforced to me the value of what we're doing. Our project (for those that don't know) is to create a school management system. The component that went live last week is an electronic registration system. More components will be added over time until it can eventually replace SIMS and the like. There are several school management systems out there (SIMS, CMIS, etc) and a couple of them are web based like ours is, but the difference is that ours is being developed with an open-source philosophy. Once the codebase is mature enough, we'll be releasing it to the open-source community. This is a HUGE thing to do. All the other school management systems out there cost each school in the realm of £10000 to buy initially, and £3000 per year in license fees! Consider that every secondary school (11-16 year olds) in the country needs one of these things, and you can see just what a vast stack of tax-payer's money is going into the pockets of these private companies. If it takes off (which I really hope it will), our system will save vast amounts of money (while hopefully earning some of us a cut of the then much smaller pot of support fees).
All this stress with work work has meant that my freelance stuff has suffered somewhat, so I've got to be sacrificing evenings to that for the next couple of weeks. It's just so hard to be motivated to do more php and html in the evening when you've had a whole day of it and just want to go to sleep. Still, it brings in a bit of extra cash, which I need with an MOT for the bike coming up very soon.
Other news summary:
Good things from the last 30 days:
Right, lunch now, then see if I can find enough motivation to deal with MS Access and VBA (worst of all the modern programming languages) to sort out Alexander Hadleigh's database.
Hello
:-Lightinthedark
It's been a busy and stressful month.
My big project at work went live on monday 2 weeks ago. There was frantic coding to try to get it ready before launch, which became an effort to get it ready enough before launch, then patching things up as we go along with all the staff using it. Several 11 hour days, and much stress and panic ensued. It's (pretty much) all up and running now, and all looks positive. The teachers are really liking it, and the admin staff are... helping us improve the system by finding lots of new features for us to add and bugs to fix. Even they seem very positive about the whole thing though, which bodes well for me asking the big boss for a pay rise.
Mike (my co-coder) has been doing a lot better of late. He's managed to take several of the things brought to our attention and fix them pretty autonomously. I still feel there are some gaps in his understanding, but at least that keeps my role as lead developer nice and secure.
Talking with Spencer (my brother-in-law, and assistant head-master at ... Swanmore school I think) yesterday reinforced to me the value of what we're doing. Our project (for those that don't know) is to create a school management system. The component that went live last week is an electronic registration system. More components will be added over time until it can eventually replace SIMS and the like. There are several school management systems out there (SIMS, CMIS, etc) and a couple of them are web based like ours is, but the difference is that ours is being developed with an open-source philosophy. Once the codebase is mature enough, we'll be releasing it to the open-source community. This is a HUGE thing to do. All the other school management systems out there cost each school in the realm of £10000 to buy initially, and £3000 per year in license fees! Consider that every secondary school (11-16 year olds) in the country needs one of these things, and you can see just what a vast stack of tax-payer's money is going into the pockets of these private companies. If it takes off (which I really hope it will), our system will save vast amounts of money (while hopefully earning some of us a cut of the then much smaller pot of support fees).
All this stress with work work has meant that my freelance stuff has suffered somewhat, so I've got to be sacrificing evenings to that for the next couple of weeks. It's just so hard to be motivated to do more php and html in the evening when you've had a whole day of it and just want to go to sleep. Still, it brings in a bit of extra cash, which I need with an MOT for the bike coming up very soon.
Other news summary:
- Girlfriend hasn't happened yet :-( I'm still looking, but it's tricky when you have requirements more specific than "alive and female".
- Bike is running ok, but needs a service, and a replacement bolt for the one which fell off on the way home from Kate and Spencer's last night which holds the gear lever on (by the left footpeg). It's currently held on with cable ties which is somewhat less than ideal.
- Friends are good. Jin's birthday went pretty well, and my 3 concentric spheres of fiberglass worked as a puzzle-based wrapping but was judged to be a little too cerebral for the usually destructive atmosphere of birthday gifts.
Good things from the last 30 days:
- Bloxorz puzzle game. There are other good ones on that site (just delete the "bloxorz" part of the url for an index).
- Camping in cornwall with Jodiejo and others.
- Warm and dry days for riding
- Upgraded CPU from eBay actually works and makes Supreme Commander a little smoother running.
- Pandora internet radio kicks ass. Pick an artist or track and it'll play music kinda like it. Very clever, very customisable, and free if you pretend to be American.
- This video of Noah K aging to beautiful music
Right, lunch now, then see if I can find enough motivation to deal with MS Access and VBA (worst of all the modern programming languages) to sort out Alexander Hadleigh's database.
Hello
:-Lightinthedark