Ah Documentation….how are you?

The importance of documentation when programming was drilled into me in college. Even if you aren’t a programmer you can sense the importance of documentation if you can recall writing those 5 paragraph essays back in school. The first paragraph summarized what the essay was about and the fifth paragraph did so again.

This became clear to me today when a coworker asked about some code I wrote recently. I had to pull up the code with him pointing to the trouble spots while doing so. This didn’t ring enough bells to give coherent answers so I had to find a version of the software running the code and look at what the screen was doing.

Eventually I figured it out, but I made the comment several times that life would have been far easier had I taken the time to document what the code was doing and possibly why it did X instead of Y.

Hopefully this will help sink in the importance of documentation and I’ll do a better job of it in the future.

*I’ll also note that I cut over 100 words from this by proofreading.

Back from the dead…

Well here it is a new year…it’s been a year and a half since my last post on this blog and it seems wordpress has improved it’s performance at least a little bit so lets see if I can keep up with it this time.

I was going to say I’d use this for tracking work type stuff again, but that isn’t interesting to anyone including myself.

Instead I’m going to change it up and make it a log of interesting technical (geeky) junk that I come across in my daily life. Could be something I’m excited about in programming or the latest version of windows 7.

Either way it promises to be useful to me in the future and an interesting read of my thoughts concerning technology as it currently exists.

Tues. 6/5/2007

As I mentioned yesterday, today consisted primarily of tweaking user interface design for a screen.

Most of my time was spent researching a couple controls that are poorly documented by the company that created them. To very little avail as there remains a couple of things I still havent managed to accomplish.

Still, after additional reorganization of the screen elements and panels things are beginning to fall into place and appear to be more usable. Grid highlighting is functional now and has been for most of the day. Segments are sectioned off somewhat well. It could be better but part of that is getting various grid components to take formatting the way I want them to and I haven’t figured that bit out yet.

Tomorrow morning will likely be some more research and then moving on to something else…possibly another screen to tweak and try to make fit the look of what I’ve done here.

Either that or reanalyzing what the current screen looks like and adjusting it some more.

Mon. 6/4/2007

Today being the wonderful Monday that Monday’s always are was not as bad as Monday’s usually have the potential to be. In fact Monday was a rather enjoyable day.

I spent the morning and most of the afternoon polishing off a quick report that I was quite happy with upon completion for the SOCCED site. Everything went quite well with that the report and associated pop up were both completed by about 2 or 3pm.

I also intermittently worked on a summary report and got a fair amount of that knocked out but not anything that would be actually useful. The majority of this report was getting the layout setup and finding some of the data. The data is still not being grabbed correctly nor is most of it populating the screen but it doesn’t seem to be a high priority at the moment so it’ll wait.

The last couple hours of the day were spent tweaking a user interface screen that needed a good bit of help to become passably usable. I had to move all sorts of panels and things around in order to get it screen elements to react properly when the screen was maximized. Then I spent a bit trying to organize the screen so the different “segments” were clearly defined.

That pretty much ran me to the wire and is where I’ll pick things up Tuesday morning.

Thur. 5/31/2007

Today consisted of a few tweaks/enhancements to the SOCCED web app.

Primarily changing up a couple database admin screens to allow for a couple of new fields that were added. This included adding a couple of combo boxes and a bit of validation logic.

I also began setting up a couple of reports to provide a bit more functionality for the client within the interface.

Wed. 5/30/2007

Today consisted of some more bug fixing on the Socced site. Fixed a problem with an email that wasn’t giving the appropriate information. Also setup an email so that it would read more appropriately and give more information than the basics it was setup for.

Also had to fix a handful of procs to resolve some date checking issues. Fixed another issue that was storing information we shouldn’t have been storing.

Tue. 5/29/2007

Well, back after the long weekend. What an exhausting weekend too, but that is a post for another blog.

Today was a slow day, most of which was spent cleaning up minor details and tweaking some code to make it slightly more efficient and such.

All useful things to do but not terribly interesting to work on.

Fri. 5/25/2007

Bugs.

Actually that was yesterday’s tag line as well. Today was about half and half. Dealt with a number of bugs not the least of which was a next business day calculation that was being thrown off because I forgot to include a year check. Checking for next business day isn’t too bad until you include holidays in the mix. The way I checked for holidays was to simply check for the day # of the year. I.E. Memorial day 2007 is day # 145. Unfortunately I forgot to consider that eventually Memorial day would have the same day #. So I added a quick check to ensure that I only checked the dates that matched this year. After all there can only be one day # 145 in any given year.

Other bugs were concentrated in SOCCED and were equally easy to resolve upon discovering their source. I also had to upload a few additional records in the SOCCED system which took a bit longer because the data I was given was not entirely accurate and therefore required a bit of…creative interpretation.

The other half of the day (and the halves were intermixed…no particular time blocks devoted to either) was spent working on various grids filling in data. The hardest part of which is (as has been the case thus far) not assembling the data but finding the appropriate places to grab the data from and ensuring that I am in fact grabbing the appropriate data.

I’ve still got a few minor bugs to work out but for the most part all the data is appearing as it should be.

Thur. 5/24/2007

Bugs.

Today was spent almost entirely fixing bugs. A little time was spent figuring out what I will work on tomorrow but for the most part I started with a few minor bug fixes I knew about and knew how to fix in one system and then receiving several emails about some bug fixes related to data in a system I haven’t worked with/in for at least 2 weeks.

So I dug around and found the easy ones first and got them taken care of and then proceeded to email back and forth to clarify just what it was I was looking for in the system that was supposedly a bug. There are still a few that are “technically” outstanding but they don’t seem to be reproducable by anyone so they’ll “remain” for the time being until they pop up again and we can hopefully reproduce them enough to discover where the problem is occurring.

Like your mechanic says (at least to himself) if it ain’t broke, I can’t fix it.

Wed. 5/23/2007

WAAAAAAAHHHHH.

Sigh. What a day. Spent the day chasing down little bugs here and there and eradicating them. The morning was spent sorting out a Data Grid which was a much easier solution than what I was going for. Fine by me.

The next problem I faced was getting data to appear in the grid. But I took care of that fairly handily.

Final problem of the day involved realizing changes in the data grid in the update procedure for the back end. This involved more erasure of data. Fortunately I didn’t wipe an entire table this time. Finally figured out what was causing the wipes. Took care of that and got everything on track just in time to write this blog.

Tomorrow should bring something new to play with. Either that or bug fixes for all the code/procs I wrote today.