My goodness, it has been a long time again.
Life in Houston goes on. Work still dominates the scene, but some things have changed. My former manager in London got moved off my project. (huge sigh of relief.) So now we have more latitude to decide things for ourselves. The cover-up routine that he had been involved in (hmm, the more you lie, the more you have to cover up) is now coming even more sharply into focus. Not that everything was really bad, but there are many things done poorly that his mis-management certainly didn't help.
Finally we have some hard questions being asked and it is a relief to be perfectly candid about the situation. That is enough to move things along so time and effort is now going into improving things and documenting what we've got. I am stalled on one project, and as I'm waiting for help on it from a vendor, I am teaching what I know to the other developers on my team. We have a nice XML-based documentation system in the works that is already making it easier to record important information as the teaching progresses.
This week I gave a presentation about some of the techniques that I have been building into our system, specifically to help get Build teams and Operations teams to talk to each other and share common tools. The Operations teams know even less than we do about the applications in the system. So I wrote a tool that essentially acts as an "expert system" for all the components in the system, meaning that it knows about all the pieces in the system and other systems it touches. It really started off as a way to just save typing, but now it is a great tool that is indispensable for daily maintenance and diagnosis. It's kinda funny how the things that seem "temporary" (quick tools that developers cook up for immediate needs) are the things that prove to be so practical and useful that they become the things that never go away. The conference room where I did the presentation was filled to seating capacity (14, I think). I think I got a positive response, which is always nice.
It's getting warm here in Houston. Not too bad yet, but the chill that used to come in the evening is gone. Mornings are still a bit cool, but that will change shortly. So I'm trying to enjoy the cooler days as much as I can before the infernal summer kicks in. The jasmine that grows on people's fences is in bloom, and it smells simply amazing.
Posted by David Cymbala at May 6, 2005 12:49 AM