I have had what many would call “one hell of a week”.
On Monday morning myself and my wife were on live television - at the GMTV studios in London, and from that point on this week I was involved in something of a coding sprint to get ready for a project milestone meeting on Thursday (yesterday).
I finally got the project to a stage that was complete enough to show the clients at about 8pm on Wednesday night. It’s always a struggle when doing a milestone meeting to choose what you are going to show the client, and what you are not going to. The nature of software development is that there is a lot of code going on beneath the surface that the client does not see, and will not appreciate.
There is a problem also that pulling enough strings together to make the software “reviewable” causes you to effectively squirt glue over big chunks of the project in order to make them talk when they might not be ready to do so in reality. Of course the problem with that is the day after the milestone meeting you have to extracate all that glue…
Basically, yesterday consisted of sitting in the conference room for the entire day with the computer screen projected onto the wall, trying to understand the client’s discussions about their own internal issues and aims, and relating them to the software being developed. The main issues you get with these discussions are that the client usually tries to make the software fit the way they do things too closely - they are “too close”.
Today I find myself sitting at a desk in a client office in the suburbs of London, waiting for a huge FTP download because the client has (a) forgotten I was coming, and (b) had none of the software I require installed.
I guess when I get back to the office on Monday I’m going to hit the ground running with the other development project, and carry on until the next milestone meeting.
Aaarrgghh
This blog is getting so boring. All I do is come out with management-type speak about the crap I am going through at work.
I have to start putting entries in when I see something funny happen - like the other morning when I cycled into work and (after not putting my feet on the ground all the way to work) managed to arrive with dog sh*t all over my left shoe… how? who knows!