RECENTLY...
(Posted 2007-12-17 16:29:53 by ArchPaladin)

Yes I know that I have not been updating as much as I was, but there have
been reasons.  The primary reason has been work related.  I have been
working on this large software project for a little over a year.  The
project is designed to replace how my company tracks its projects and all
associated project status, financial information, billing details, and so
on.  It has been an absolute beast to work on, and is without a doubt the
largest project that I have ever done to date.  For those who are
interested in the technical details, I have designed an entire database
structure, written a server backend for the system to interact with our
main file servers, written a large and highly configurable client, and
constructed an entire security policy for all the data that is going to be
handled.

This past week the entire system went into production.  It didn't really
perform as expected.  When it started handling data of the size that the
company works with it started to choke and slow down.  This past week I
have been running around making sure that everything still works and tuning
the application to make it faster without redesigning everything.  That has
obviously been very tiring.

The worst part of all of it has been that - as the sole implementer of the
project - the feedback I have received from others close to the project has
been worse than useless.  My boss and coworkers don't understand a lot of
what went into the system, and they have been loudly persistent in
suggesting changes that would:


* Not meet the program's requirements

* Require a rewrite of large parts of the application

* Not fix the problems they are trying to address* 
* All of the above



Now, if I write some program that doesn't meet the need it was designed for
I can go back and change it.  I don't mind the criticism that what I wrote
didn't do what was actually needed.  However, I have a harder time working
with the criticism that what I wrote worked, but poorly.  Or that the
entire design from step 1 was bad.  Or that the system the company had in
place before the switch was better, and we should go back.  Program design
and source code is often described by its writers as "thoughts on paper"
because the specific way a program goes about doing things is highly
dependent on the thought process of the individual that wrote it.  Thus,
hearing the statements that everything was badly designed comes off as a
personal attack, regardless of whether or not that's how the statement was
intended, and regardless of whether or not the statement is true.

Now, I do think that parts of what I wrote were badly designed (now that I
know how everything actually performs), and I am fixing it.  But throwing
out the good with the bad, or refusing to acknowledge that what I wrote
does what it was designed to do, that I find upsetting.

So anyway...I have been exhausted recently trying to handle all of this. 
Hence the lack of posts.  Of course we can add to that all of the seasonal
hassles.  I will be very glad when Christmas is over this year and things
quiet down some.

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