work
Starting New Project At Work
A few months back I was involved in developing a
prototype of an Executive View application, using WPF
technology. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the project,
mainly due to us using Tangerine, a pre-developed
application from Infragistics. While it did help us
get the prototype out the door in a timely fashion, I
didn’t want us to go the route of just building on
top of that application. Luckily we didn’t go that
route. It was decided we could use Tangerine as a
reference application, which is what I was pulling
for from the beginning.
This week will mark the first iteration of The Executive View development. We are doing it in .NET 3.5, with a Silverlight front end. It will be a nice diversion from the project I was working on, which will be nice. I’m not the biggest fan of Silverlight development, mainly because here I am trying to get out of Microsoft development all together, and I’m going to be learning a totally new development environment. At the same time I guess it is pretty cool to be developing using the newest, cutting-edge technology. We’ll see how it goes.
This week will mark the first iteration of The Executive View development. We are doing it in .NET 3.5, with a Silverlight front end. It will be a nice diversion from the project I was working on, which will be nice. I’m not the biggest fan of Silverlight development, mainly because here I am trying to get out of Microsoft development all together, and I’m going to be learning a totally new development environment. At the same time I guess it is pretty cool to be developing using the newest, cutting-edge technology. We’ll see how it goes.
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Finally released to Production
Jul 04 2008 12:08 AM Filed in: Personal
After a little more than a year of development, or at
least I think it’s been that long; not exactly sure
when this project started...our application was
released to production today. I think as a team, and
as an organization, we have learned a lot about the
agile development process, and see where we made our
mistakes, and see where we can improve as time goes
on. Our future iterations should be a lot smoother
from this day forward.
Faster *crack whip* Faster
Jun 15 2008 10:53 PM Filed in: Personal
The DRM project I am working on at work has been
going on now for about a year. We should have a
usable product in production, but we found that after
all this time in development, the application is
quite unusable. I don’t think there’s any one thing
or person to blame for this, but if I can think of
anything we could have done differently, I’d point to
us spending too much time working on polishing the
application up to look all pretty for the customer,
while neglecting the actual day-to-day use.
We got a pretty good talking too, and management went into crisis mode. Here they are selling the application to all the users, everyone wants it, but if the user were to sit down with it they would find it was very slow. The architecture and design we chose for our application just wasn’t suited for the amount of data that it would handle. We were told we had 3 - 4 weeks to get it working. We tossed around a couple ideas, and finally came up with spreading the saving of data out over time, instead of trying to save it all at once. It was a huge change, we would basically be redesigning a large portion of the back-end; but as of Friday, 3 weeks into the crisis mode development, all was working well. We have a couple things to take care of this week and next, but overall, the big work is done.
Hopefully management learns a lesson from this, and we can concentrate on getting the core functionality of the application working, instead of worrying about the window themeing and animated cursors, and pretty icons.
We got a pretty good talking too, and management went into crisis mode. Here they are selling the application to all the users, everyone wants it, but if the user were to sit down with it they would find it was very slow. The architecture and design we chose for our application just wasn’t suited for the amount of data that it would handle. We were told we had 3 - 4 weeks to get it working. We tossed around a couple ideas, and finally came up with spreading the saving of data out over time, instead of trying to save it all at once. It was a huge change, we would basically be redesigning a large portion of the back-end; but as of Friday, 3 weeks into the crisis mode development, all was working well. We have a couple things to take care of this week and next, but overall, the big work is done.
Hopefully management learns a lesson from this, and we can concentrate on getting the core functionality of the application working, instead of worrying about the window themeing and animated cursors, and pretty icons.
Moved to a new building
Apr 21 2008 09:38 AM Filed in: Personal
Turner Broadcasting, in Atlanta, is split amongst a
couple places. They have a main campus, which is very
nice, and they have a floor in a building in midtown.
For the past 4 years I have been working at the nice
campus, but that all changed, and now the department
I work for is in the building in midtown. When you've
worked at a nice private campus, it really sucks to
have to move to a building shared by other
businesses. We also went from having a personal
parking deck, to having a couple parking decks spread
out over a couple block radius. One good thing that
came from the move is I have started taking public
transportation to work. I should have done this a
long time ago. Driving in Atlanta sucks, I live 12
miles from work, and if I don't time it correctly, it
can take up to an hour to get to work or back home. I
live within 2 miles of a MARTA station, and it drops
me off within 2 blocks of work, so I will start
saving money on transportation and also not put so
many miles on my car.