Today’s work was a standard day, well except for the morning, actually no, that was a standard morning too, things didn’t work too well, they needed fixing, during which there were random jokes at Ben’s expense due to his pure love of graphs. With some help from Remo (my team manager) though, we did manage to work out some confusing MySQL queries – which as always, were actually remarkably simple, but until you see it, it’s harder than Michael Jackson visiting a pre-school (did I say this blog was probably bad for kids, fans of MJ and anyone who gets offended too easily?)
One thing I am still happy about today though is the re-write of our current tools into a tidier, faster, more usable fashion. I got more code nailed down today and the big jobs still work on a “insert only” principle with the database: there’s only one select at the start then the rest of the script does a few big inserts to do all it needs to do – and it still provides us with all the data we need for post-processing and lovely graphs (all for you Ben, all for you!)
In other news, I’ve been working for a client on RentACoder recently that has been superb for two reasons:
1) He always is clear about his needs with great spec docs, even down to the tables in MySQL to use;
2) He pays well, repeatedly.
However…the two recent jobs with him are not so smooth, I’m still not sure if it’s just me being overly blonde or he thinks I know the system far better than I do based on what I’ve worked on so far. But these two jobs are pretty much not moving as I allocated time for them tonight only to start work on them both and stop 1 hour later after spending most of that hour trying to understand both jobs. In the end though, even if the specs are lacking, I’ve only got myself to blame, I keenly accepted the jobs before checking the spec and now I’m confused and obliged to do them at a time that doesn’t suite me. Once again a case of “do as I say, not as I do” – many people will attest to my emphatic desire for very detailed spec documents before starting a job.
