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.