Tough week...

I hope I didn't just jinx myself by typing in "tough week" as the title of this post. The fact is, I think it is going to be a really difficult week. But somehow, I know that I'm going to resolve everything, or it will be resolved in a way that is agreeable to my situation, whatever that situation is.

I have to think about the parts that I have to assemble to program this PROCESS MANAGER and understand what the database system is going to look like. I'm mostly referring to the data structure. Curtis had mentioned that using a BLOB (Binary Large Object) would be something interesting to consider and using XML to access the data. I'm not what he's talking about but he said he'd show me.

What I have to do is to establish the look and feel for all of our products so that they start getting more of a finished look. *this coffee sucks*... There are also some things that I need to resolve in having Dreamweaver MX use MySQL and what the database's records are going to look like, what the structure is like...

Ok, enough wining and pseudo planning... Here's what I have to do...

1. ESTABLISH TOOL SETS.
   
2. ESTABLISH SITE LOOK AND FEEL
3. UNDERSTAND WHAT THE DATA FIELDS ARE GOING TO LOOK LIKE.
4. GET DREAMWEAVER TO WORK WITH MYSQL
5. GET LATEST PROCESS MANAGER SRS FROM RUTH.
6. BY THE END OF THIS WEEK, FINALIZE ALL THE DESIGNS THAT RUTH WANTS TO IMPLEMENT IN THE PROCESS MANAGER.
7. TALK ABOUT A SCHEDULE ONCE ALL THE PARTS ARE IN PLACE.

This should give me enough to do all week. I'll be surprised if I can get all this stuff done like I'd like to. But it's good to have goals and aim high.

Gettin' down to the wire...

I had a deadline of "last-week" to turn in to my boss a sample of how we were going to design a Process Manager. Basically, it's fancy word for a hybrid strange type of task manager that has to play nice-nice with Outlook.

I turned in one part of the design and met my deadline but he sensed that I didn't have a grasp of the process manager's relational data base system. How perceptive of him to notice that I didn't know what I was talking about... He was right, I didn't. But neither do a lot of people in software... I have rarely seen a situation where a developer knew all the ins and outs of what he or she was going to develop.... Usually, they haven't a clue, hence the name that was coined for IBM, "vapor-ware".

That's what I was trying to sell him. He noticed that I was struggling so he gave me another week to try and figure it out. Well, here it is, another week and I'm still not sure how we're going to arrange the data and what kind of tables are involved in the database. Now, I'm working with a very experienced co-worker that is quite knowledgable of data-structures, algorithms and data base search engines. He told me about a few and although they sounded interesting, didn't immediately solve our present dilemma. In fact, I am now more confused than last week.

Well, we're down to the wire again and still, no design... I have no idea what my boss's reaction is going to be. It can't be good. But actually, I do have a plan. Only that it requires that the really experienced programmer agrees with it. If I can get him to do this, we might have a product that we can work with. It's all written in php/mysql, a standard multi-platform development environment. Because it's written in this common language, it can be implemented and edited to suit our needs.

More to come.