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02-16-00 Back to all Archives Back to 2000: January - March Archives Back to Current Entry list |
I did get to see snow today, out the window as we sat around a circle of tables, laptops, and a tangle of bright yellow network lines discussing some minor but apparently extremely critical detail about the system this company is trying to implement. Turned my head and there it was, falling gently from the sky, tiny puffs of white. My brief glimpes of daylight come from that window. Otherwise I am seeing this part of Massachusetts in the dark. And mind you, even in the dark, it seems to be a beautiful place. There's lots of trees. There's snow on the ground. It's nice and cold. I like the cold. Okay, maybe I'm not exactly used to this cold out here, but I remember being used to it once. And there's snow. Did I mention the snow? The meetings during the day are long and fast-paced. They're figuring out what they want their system to do; I and one other person are there to collect these requirements and carry them back to the development team. Some of the things coming down the pipeline are big, complex, highly convoluted bits of logic. I'm biting my tongue, itching to jump in with suggestions because when they toss out one of these ideas, it's all I can do to stomp on my brain as it runs off and immediately tries to figure out the best way to code that thorny bit of logic. We're talking requests that will take months to complete - requests that will make the developers involved want to pull out their hair. I'm nearly drooling, I want to start coding on them that bad. So what if it might be stressful and I end up working long hours and there will be times when I hate that stupid bit of logic and wonder who the idiot was who came up with it in the first place…but once it's done there's such a sense of satisfaction that the impossible has been made possible. I could touch on the whole political aspect of this project but I suppose I'd better leave that one alone for now. Suffice it to say that it amuses me…..in fact, quite a lot about this project this week amuses me. I'm not so sure the other participants would be as thrilled by that statement. Now if I could only get more than four hours of sleep a night…… |