About two weeks ago, my general manager decided to mix some things up at work. Our web development team has been busy for a while doing many larger scale projects; recently many of those projects have been for our parent company. Some of the Rapidparts projects have been pushed aside to get those done because we earned money for doing those. He wasted a way to renew the interest in developing systems that improve internal business processes and generate more sales. He decided to create a special projects team of which i am a part.
I've been split off from the rest of the web development team and have been paired with another smart guy to get stuff done. If Rapidparts is Law and Order, we thing of ourselves as Rapidparts: SPU (Special Projects Unit). We a focused on certain types of projects. Our first mission is to tackle a large project that's been on the plate for three years now but nothing seems to have been done yet. In order to make sure things don't stay that way, we've been given whatever authority we need in order to make things happen.
One of the best parts about this new assignment is in order to make sure i can stay focused on our new team projects, i've been absolved of having to maintain or support any of our existing applications. I've been at Rapidparts for a while now and have written a lot of code; in the beginning, much of it was crap. Recently i've spent more time maintaining and enhancing existing applications rather than creating new stuff. I've been forcing myself to keep all the logic of how current applications work in my active memory so i know how to adjust them. However, now i get to start with a clean slate again. I can free up my mind by dumping all that old stuff and just thinking about this one project. It feels great.
The other interesting thing about this project is that i will working mostly on our IBM P630 running AIX. This means that the final product will be a green-screen app written in Informix-4GL. While i have done something like this before for Rapidparts, that was a while ago and i will have to do quite a bit of re-learning. I need to forget all about that fancy new object-oriented stuff for a while and relearn the wonders of procedural code. I've also gotten rather accustomed to Visual Studio and it may take a while to memorize all those VI commands again. I'm sure this project will have many more challenges to overcome such at these, but i'm up to it.
Posted by Matthew at May 18, 2005 06:59 PM