I'm still alive...I think. »

This past weekend I had a good friend in from out of town and a project deadline rapidly approaching...so I had very little free computer time to play with my own interests and projects.

In fact, the deadline for the Bowker project I've been working on was today (but got pushed to tomorrow)...so Sunday night I was working until about 2am, Monday I worked at the office from about 8am till 9:30pm, and today I did about the same schedule...

Normally I wouldn't be doing quite the rush and crush...but last week the project went from a team of 3 internal developers (including myself), and 2 external developers...to just me and the 2 external developers. The external team is not always available...so the past few days it's been mostly my responsibility to make sure we hit this deadline...

And of course this meant bashing my head through a few thousand lines of other people's code (this project is mostly a mix of PHP and Javascript tying to an Oracle database and a handful of web services serving up XML -- the web services are also part of the scope so really I'm helping to build both ends)...all of the front end code is managed through a closed coldfusion based CMS system (called Prism)...and all of the web services are built in a custom PHP framework (that is somewhat like PHPCake without actually being PHPCake)

In the end this all means that I've been spending enormous amounts of time getting to know a number of systems that I probably won't/can't reuse...and there isn't even that much from the experience that I can grep out to share with you all here (well that's not entirely true as I'm sure there are a handful of rants I could really pour out from all of this).

Of course they do pay me pretty well for dealing with this type of thing, so I guess I can't complain too much...and after all I do like a challenge!