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Thursday, July 28, 2005
constants of software development
We are approaching our first deliverable out of the new PC Guardian office in Williamsburg. It isn’t "my" project although I have been involved significantly on the periphery to help with sticky issues. The developers who are working on this project are all very talented but most of them are relative green, and for them, this is the first large scale project they have ever worked on. This makes for interesting observations.
I noticed this last week a truth that seems universal with all software development projects. No matter how much time one has to complete a project, there is always a fair amount of scrambling right at the end. We had one sticky issue that was solved this morning resulting in almost all of the red boxes on our test matrix to go away. Good job guys!
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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Changes
After the 3GI/RSA collapse happened a little over 3 years ago, I often said that my experience there had been the worst thing that could have happened to me from a work perspective. It was such an amazing work experience that nothing could ever live up to it. I hope that I now have an opportunity to prove myself wrong. Yesterday I turned in my resignation to the College of William and Mary. I have had the chance to work with a great group of people and it was a very hard decision for me to make, but I knew if I passed up this chance I would regret it.
The soul of the Williamsburg 3GI office was Kit Letchworth and Tom Barr. They got in touch with me a couple of weeks ago and invited me to join them for a presentation. They were looking for a group of developers to form the core of what will become the east coast office for PC Guardian Technologies. As far as I can tell I am employee number 3. Although I don’t technically start until May 1, I have already begun the recruiting effort to get people I think would be good fits for the organization. I’m having mixed success, but since I have never done this before, I’m relatively pleased. Between a few former 3GI folks and people I have met through my CS classes at W&M I think we will have a good start.
I get to play a similar role to what I did at 3GI; I will be doing software design and architecture as well as being the entire IT department. It is a role I really enjoy as it lets me play with lots of different things. At the beginning I expect the IT role will be dominating as we need to get an office up from scratch; everything from wiring to servers to computers for all the developers and test staff.
So, there you have it. The cat is out of the bag. And in the immortal words of Tom Barr: “This period of relative inactivity is coming to a close.”
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Wednesday, January 12, 2005
conundrum, dilemma, odd thing at work
I have a project at work that is posing a sort of problem for our team. This project, let’s call it project FERRET, has been requested by a rather influential person. This is not a new project, it is making functional changes to an existing system that to a large extent works, albeit clunkily. He has indicated that, in his view, the requirements of the project are rather simple. And if you look at exactly what he wants, he is correct.
The problem arose when we talked to the users of the system and actually looked at the system itself. It is a mess. To really make a system that I could be proud of, it needs a ground up rebuild. Our team has come up with some great ideas that would result in a wonderfully flexible, clean system that would really take the drudgery out of dealing with this data for the people who use the system and let them actually do their jobs instead of paperwork and cutting and pasting. But that will take at least 9-12 months. We don’t have that kind of time.
So we have come up with a short term solution. It isn’t bad, and I am thrilled that one of my teammates came up with it, because I couldn’t think up with a way to cut this project down. I was stuck in my own head with doing it the "right" way.
In the end I hate having a situation where we can either do something that works, but isn’t the best answer in the required time, or do great work that we can be very proud of that will make our team look damn good with a powerful person on campus, but not in the time allotted.
sigh.
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