Finishing Up a Few Things and Some Fun with Filemaker Pro
Today I spent a good bit of the morning finishing up a few things on my first yearly review here at The Shop. One of the most disappointing things about the review was that I needed to create a development plan for the coming year. This makes sense then you're talking about a 27 year old kid - but by 47, if I'm not on the top of my game - and able to stay there, then I shouldn't be in this position. It's like asking Tiger Woods "Yo, Tiger - what are your plans for a better game next year?"
I'm not saying I'm the Tiger Woods of coding, but I also don't need to have a development plan because people are put-off by my intensity, and some are scared to approach me. While I don't see this as a wonderful asset, I have to say that the review pointed out that my skills, speed, quality of work, and communication are the best around. "Raising the bar..." and "Setting the standard..." were quotes from the review.
So yeah, I can be focused and intense, and this can put off some folks. I don't mean it to happen, but then again, it's not like it's a mystery, either. Anyway... I needed to finish up some stuff with the review. Tomorrow it'll be over, and we'll see what happens as a consequence of this with the bonus. That will be very enlightening.
Once I was done with that, I had to mess around with this web app I inherited, and once again, found how horribly built this code is. The original author decided that comments were unnecessary at the time, and subsequently was not able to help me with anything I needed to figure out. He's a nice guy... I like him, personally... but if I were his manager, I'd tell him that if he did this again, I'd have him on app support for six months. It's a disgrace.
So I had to struggle through this bad codebase trying to figure out what needed to be done, and while it was only about 3 hrs of work, it seemed like an eternity. I want to do a good job, but it's tasks like this that make me want to scream.
When I got done with that, I was able to spend a little time fiddling with Filemaker Pro 10 on the application for a friend's office that needed a few changes. Interestingly, the changes were very minor - the format of a date field, the change of a report field, the calculation of the rows in a table... pretty simple stuff. It took me no more than an hour and all the things they've been worrying about for months were fixed.
It's amazing how unimportant customer service is to some folks. The original developer was getting $80/month for this app, and they wanted a few changes. He probably could have changed them in 10 mins, but chose not to. Things kept getting nasty, and finally, he told them it's over. That's a first - the developer firing the client. But that's when they came to me.
Too bad. He's out $80/month and they get what they wanted all along. His loss.