It’s like dancing with the Angry Molesting Tree

Well – my first day working away from The Hive is also going to be my last (at least for now). Tomorrow I am back in the office for a day, then I am off on my five day weekend, and I suspect that my day will be split in to three main parts.

First will be explaining why today wasn’t as much of a success as we’d hoped.

Second will be taking Jesse through the CSS application, since he has a major presentation this coming Thursday.

Third will be finishing off the testing for the DRM that I started at home today – I got stuck half way through and had to abandon it because I couldn’t do what I needed to do!

The worst thing is that things didn’t actually go that badly at the Liverpool branch of Board Silly. We did a bit of testing, and a bit of talking, and the system we run at The Hive was pretty much compatible with the system they currently run there.

And it wouldn’t take too much work to make it fully compatible, and to set up the system link between the two branches.

However, since it is coming up to Christmas (gods help us! Christmas is actually close in terms of man-hours and even closer in terms of work days), the managers at both branches (Liverpool and us) don’t want to disrupt the store with the work it would take.

So they are putting it on hold for the moment, and are going to revisit at some point in the future.

The upside is my bosses (Jesse) are quite happy with this explanation – they don’t see it as a failure of the software, or of The Hive, or of me (thank the gods!) but just of the situation we are in and the times we live in.

Plus they see the day spent today as time that was worth spending, rather than me just wasting a day away from the office. Which is also nice (though that is more for me than it is for the company in general!)

The CSS project is complete to pre Phase one. That is – there are three main phases (imaginatively titled phase one, phase two and phase three, although I wanted to call them Buffy, Kendra and Faith) and each phase adds a new piece of functionality to the existing.

Phase one is the initial version – it has to do what we want it to do, but without any fancy bells, whistles and candy floss. And pre Phase one is where we are now – it doesn’t do everything we want, but it does demonstrate that we have the ability to do it, and that – with a bit more development time – we can do everything we need to be able to do.

Basically it is a demo version – one we can take out and show to the customers so that – as I said – we can prove we have the abilities and capabilities to develop the application further, should more funding become available.

(Because, as with almost everything in life, the only thing that stops applications being developed is a lack of funding, or an adverse reaction to the application).

I have written a simple document explaining how to use it, so that not only can Jesse demonstrate it, but he can give it to the customer to play with (sorry – to test!) as well. However I have been told in the past that my explanations are not always clear and sometimes can be more confusing than helpful. 

So tomorrow I’m going to take him through how to use the application so he can make his own notes and explain it to the customers in his own way. 

(My basic problem is I am a codemonkey at heart, and so I see things in terms of forms and buttons and databases and interfaces, rather than how the user would tend to see it. And so when I explain how to use it, I explain it like I would explain it to another codemonkey, rather than a user).

But I am learning from my mistakes, and getting better at writing user manuals and user guides, rather than technical manuals and specifications. And – maybe someday, I will learn to do it properly!

And of course, after the working day is over, I will have a few hours to do a final tidy up before my girlfriend arrives to share the three day holiday with me. So you can probably expect there not to be a great deal of updates over the next five or six days.

Because while I am willing to share a great deal of my life with anyone reading this, there are limits as to how far that goes!