Double Time
I thought for sure that the year-end couldn't possibly get any busier. Last month I spent long hours at work leaving very little time for personal projects. Normally I spend most of my time working with managers and senior software developers. As a director of software development I don't normally build software applications myself -I have talented senior developers who do the heavy lifting.
One of the things I enjoy most about my job is that I'm constantly challenged and I'm able to remain very technical. Most of my computer programming these days is spent on special projects for my employer. You know... the sorts of projects classified as urgent and mission critical. The one's typically associated with impossible work schedules. I'm not complaining. Actually I'm rather proud of helping to pull off the impossible, time and time again. Although, it is getting increasingly more difficult to do this with age.
The screen shot below is of an urgent application I recently completed with my teams manager of software development. It's a one to two month project collapsed into two weeks. My department's manager focused on the backend database - importing and transforming data and building key stored procedures, while I built the web application. I guess I'm proud of our effort - although I don't think we can pull off another one of these until at least next year.
The black areas have been used to mask the identity of the application and my employer. Can't really say much more about the application other than that it's written in C#/ASP.NET. It's been a good learning experience as I picked up a few new techniques which I'm eager to apply on future projects.
Carlos Justiniano: technologist, veteran software developer, world record holder, entrepreneur.