4/4/2007 – Day #3

Wow…what a difference a day makes. So as I mentioned on D2, I was having some trouble sorting out the final challenge of the day. I came back this morning and while I’m still sorting through some testing to make sure my logic makes sense I’m powering through the problem.

What made the difference? Jumping in and going after it I guess. I started small (as you are SUPPOSED to…I don’t know why I didn’t yesterday) and hammered out the test for changing the day based on 4pm end of business day constraint. Then I got the tables in place for the holiday piece. Got that taken care of. Sorting out the non-business day stuff is taking a bit of doing and it’s pretty easy to get lost in where and what I’m tracking in order to do my testing. Still, I’m getting it done and I’m really pleased with what I’ve got going on right now. Especially for not being terribly familiar with SQL and/or SQL Server. (Thank you MSDN.)

And that’s all before lunch! =D
[EDIT!]
Went and got some Pizza from Mama’s for lunch…it was pretty tasty. http://www.mamaspizza.us/

Any who…after lunch what did I do? So I continued sorting through the logic to check for non-business days…had to rework it and make it prettier. My supervisor helped with that…his version didn’t work but I learned a lot from the code/queries he wrote and used that to fix mine up and was really happy with the result. Then I had to rework the tables to fit better with how he (supervisor) wanted them to work which was fine…I had already thought some of that out and it wasn’t a lot of extra work. The most difficult part was probably coming up with a set of queries to fill a table with major U.S. Holidays. That was just a pain. Fortunately he already had a script that did everything but T-giving. Thanks to google I found a script piece that I could modify to work for what we needed. Super awesome. That pretty much filled the day up.

Got in again around 8am and left shortly after 5. It was a good day.

4/3/2007 – Day #2

ACK! I forgot to write this up yesterday…oh well. Here it is early today…before I get to day #3.

Worked a bit more on the same web app. More enhancements, things are getting a bit more challenging although still well within my range of skills. The rust is coming off fairly quickly as I get back into the swing of things. Started the day off by finishing off the stuff I worked on last night, that took about an hour. Then moved on to a few new changes including adding a date range search capability. That was quick and easy. Worked on a couple other small changes including adding some warning text about going back a page and losing some info you’d entered…that sort of thing.

Biggest challenge came a couple hours before the end of the day. Have to create a new table and setup some logic to account for the next business day based on a timeframe and major U.S. holidays. I should’ve tackled the timeframe stuff first as that should’ve been fairly quick to implement but I didn’t. I immediately started messing with the table stuff for the holidays. Silly me. Got nowhere…so that’ll be the first thing I work on tomorrow.

Oh and I had a Sun-dried Turkey sandwich for lunch…it was delicious. I actually had that with me yesterday but I went out with some of the guys at lunch and grabbed a Mesquite Chicken with Bacon Sub! That was good too.

Met a few new people, everyone’s been great…very nice and all that, and here we are on Day #3. Check back later for an update.