Category: Technology

A major project culminated on Saturday July 25. I did something unusual. Instead of jumping into another project or lighting a big fire under my sales and marketing hat, I spent a week tending to long neglected personal things. This was both necessary and cathartic. I feel human again.

Today I did some final testing on some client code and got final approvals and sign-off closing out yet one other project. I now turn my energies to patch a little code as a favor to an old client of mine and this afternoon I have a scheduled conference call to complete some research for a bid for what may be my next project. Hopefully by the end of the week I’m off overhead and back to billables. So far, I think it is a good idea to add a week of "no work" after an extensive project for tidying up loose ends and making up for neglected areas in my personal life. However, if by the end of this week I am not back to billable hours, I will declare it a failed experiment and begin working on a mental breakdown.

Yesterday a major project ended for me. This project, as most, consumed my life. I gave up sleeping, found myself wearing the same clothes days in a row because I didn’t know the day had changed, skipped meals, and pretty much neglected anything that wasn’t related to getting the job done. Today I examine the aftermath. Yes, I thought I’d take the day away from the computer but if you stop the momentum, the project never really closes.

When I was a quality assurance engineer so many eons ago, I pushed hard for postmortems. In the software world, a postmortem is an examination after the project to review the development process while fresh in mind with the goal of improving the process on upcoming projects. A postmortem doesn’t just discuss where things went wrong but where things went right. A postmortem can include the ever important cleanup that happens afterward such as backing up the development environment, closing out your notes, jotting down notes about assumptions that were made and things aside for the future, and anything else to bring full closure to a project. In the real world, not many people like postmortems. They represent overheard to management and extra work to the developer. And it may or may not be billable to the client. People want to simply celebrate the product delivery, shove everything on the desk to the floor, and move onto the next project.

My postmortem is not billable to the client. Examining the aftermath, I recognize the importance of wrapping up to be able to move on. I can’t even find the surface of my desk right now for the scattered notes and neglected pile of mail. Instead of taking a break today, I’m going to bring closure to my project. (and find my desk).

I’m giddy and nervous as all get out. My most visible, mission critical web application ever is being put to the test in front of hundreds of people in a live audience. It’s cool to see it in action!

I turn to my Windows98 machine running an ancient version of Photoshop. In a flattened image, I select a small region and copy its contents. I open a new image automatically sized to the selected region. I paste the copy into the new window and immediately copy the layer and hide the background layer. This gives me the ability to have transparency in the image. I outline the parts I want to keep then create a new layer. In that layer I fill the selection with red and reduce the opacity to 50%. Next I invert the selection and go back to the layer with my image. I delete the extraneous graphics and save the photoshop file. Then I save a gif with transparency optimized for the web. I go back to the source image and note the x, y coordinates of the upper left corner of the selection. I spin to my Linux box with MySQL Query Browser open and I update the database with the x, y coordinates and the new image name.

I’m repeating this process for roughly 160 images. I should be using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for this.

With a computer for each child, I have lots of test platforms!