Holy Guacamole, what a week it's been! Actually, it's been a two-week week. As I last blogged here, I got "an assignment" from my prospective employer to write up a program to show my skills. I get the specs and it seems easy so I quickly write back "no problem; I'll have it for you next week". I work on it on the Veteran's Day holiday and am surprised that I get it 90% finished in about three hours or so. "Hey," I thought to myself, "I am as good as I thought I was." And then I let it sit for most of the weekend thinking I'll just check it over on Sunday before I email it back to the guy.
Well, Sunday comes and I review the spec once more to make sure I've covered everything. Hmm, almost. I was supposed to build a program to search for files based on user-entered search criteria--that part was easy--and it is supposed to search the current directory and every subdiretory below that. Oh. Okay... Well, I told him "next week", I never specified a particular day. I can work on it a bit at work, too, right? No way, Jose. Turns out back at work I've got a bit of a production problem the users are clammoring about. I'm focused on that every minute of the workday. And then, a big-ass production problem kicks in on Tuesday and I'm putting in overtime all week to try to resolve it. I've got no time at work for this extra project and with the overtime I'm getting home late and after dealing with kids and other home stuff I've got maybe 30-60 minutes of awake time to try and solve the new wrinkle in my "audition piece".
I fix my major production problem at work. Or so I thought. Turns out I made a journeyman's error (which, BTW, slipped right through the walkthru with two other programmers) of not correcting some cut-and-paste code. So then I have to re-fix my fixed program and put that back into production. And it bombs out again! You can imagine my boss is feeling the pressure which she passes on to me. Further analysis reveals that my program is not at fault but the data is hinky for about two dozen records (out of about 4300 total). Just as the day is coming to an end last Friday, I create a way to pull off those records, put the rest through the conversion program and then bring the offending records back in (they were essentialy already converted by another program). I give the word to the data center to run that jobstream as soon as possible and if it finishes okay to run the rest of the regular jobs that have been held up for a week. Meanwhile I'm still plugging away the finishing touches for my extra-curricular assignment and at about 5pm on Friday I ship off my solution.
My wife takes me out to dinner that night during which I get a call on my cell phone: the job ran fine as did the first step of the regular run as well. Whew! The next day is my birthday and we go out to eat again. I still had a web page I had done at work which I was going to clean up (removing the proprietary info) and send off to my possible-future employer but birthday stuff got in the way.
This morning I check in and so far I'm hearing good things from my users. There's 4 or 5 records with unique conditions that didn't process quite right but overall the data looks great and properly updated. So, I'll be ablet to spend the rest of this morning and early afternoon finishing up that web page. I just hope my work outshines my tardiness and that the reason for my lateness--my dedication to my primary job--is seen in a good light as well.
During all this folderol, I've had to put off putting together something for potential outside web client as well. This job is going to force me to resurrect what little Flash knowledge I have but it will also require a good dose of creativity on my part. It should be fun.
It never rains but it pours.
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