Work

The (big, fancy, secret) project I work on moved to Production this week. The test cycle was a joke, but half a dozen people inside the company have been using it and I’ve been getting the feedback I need to keep the application free of bugs. So the site has launched and people can log [...]

Since my project just got pushed to Test and we have to wait for them now, I’ve found myself with some time at work. So the boss’s boss tasked me and J to another project…
The “other project” is an inventory system under a totally different group (Not even in the E-Commerce division). I’m still trying [...]

A project at my company goes through these phases:
1. Analysis, Design, Documentation
2. Development
3. Testing
4. Production
I just finished my big, fancy, secret project’s development cycle and moved into testing. Now I get to sit back and work a relaxed 40-hour week while the testers get all uppity and excited and overworked, while I grace their screens [...]

Tomorrow is the end of the Development cycle for my (big, fancy, secret) project at work. I ran into some interesting complications and learned a few things in the process:
1. How to write a Windows Service
2. Windows Services don’t like regular winform timers, you have to use a System.Timers.Timer(). Otherwise, it’ll compile and run, but [...]

Just a quick tip for the Googlers out there who find themselves with as empty a search page as I was. If you’re developing a .NET application using a 3rd-party library to access a DB2 database, sucks to be you.
Anyway, when calling a stored procedure on the DB2 server, you may get a DB2Exception reading [...]

The next release of the big, fancy, secret project I’m working on at work is due within two weeks. By “working on”, of course, I mean “Rewriting from scratch, in six weeks, what took the last guy 18 months; only now with object orientation and a much improved UI”. I completed two major segments of [...]

Today at work I was asked about the lack of “cute pictures” in a technical document I wrote regarding the planned creation of the next phase of the (big, fancy, secret) project I work on. Specifically, the boss wanted Visio flowcharts and screenshots of something that doesn’t exist. I mentioned it earlier today.
Obviously, you [...]

I handed in a design document for the next release of the (big, secret, fancy) project I’m working on. The boss wanted to know why there were no “cute pictures”, meaning Visio flowcharts. The answer was simply that based on the previous release’s documentation, we know that the documentation will change so wildly that there’s [...]

Sunday at 3AM, I finished some bugfixes and pushed code to test. Apparently Test was unprepared for it and flew off the handle as a result.
Tester Lead: “There was a code drop at 3 AM last night!”
Dev Mgr: “So?”
Tester Lead: “Don’t you think that’s a little unusual?”
Dev Mgr: “Well, try as I might, I just [...]

One of my computers at home is dedicated to productivity work (i.e. research, development, etc). Generally when I describe the computer to people, they gape in awe or exclaim how crazy I must be. Allow me to provide a brief synopsis for your Googling pleasure.
My main productivity machine started out as a pretty basic system. [...]