OT & Plans For The Near Future
At work, we have been in the process of modernizing and expanding our information systems over the past couple of years (before I came on board), and that is a very exciting prospect. Naturally, growth has its own growing pains, and our department certainly is no exception to that rule. Fortunately, however, we have a solid staff of hard-working programmers with a bit of foresight, so we started having secret meetings (sadly, without a secret handshake) to plan how we can best re-develop our core systems to meet our next set of needs. To show how serious we were, I even set up a secret blog…
At any rate, we’re also lucky to have some managers with foresight and combined IT and business knowledge, so they could see many of the same shortcomings. We all met yesterday and spent three hours figuring out our game plan.
The short of it is that I will develop the next major project, which will be the first step into a big plan to connect our place of business with a good number of others, coordinating our efforts with other departments. At the same time, we are all going to work on re-developing and refining our core systems: our information collection structure, security system, development framework, common tools, etc. We’re also moving over to a test-driven development environment.
The great part about being in this kind of situation is that you get to learn a lot of new technologies, techniques, and ways of thinking and programming; the less great part is the effort you have to put in… But hey, at least I get paid overtime…
This weekend, I’m going to focus on three tasks. Task #1 is to learn more about test-driven development. Another co-worker is the expert on this and he’s going to have a series of demonstrations, but he hasn’t put together all of the materials yet, so I want to pre-empt that and work on my own. Looking at what Phil Haack (and various smart commenters) say about Rhino Mocks versus MoQ, I’m thinking about going with MoQ as I want to learn Lambdas (which means Rob Conery is my man here). We have Rhino Mocks at work as well, and I’ll put some effort into that too and see which one I prefer. But before that, I want to read up more on TDD, and there are some resources available for that. Naturally, it’s good when I can combine it with MVC, as even though I won’t be using it on my next project, I really like the MVC idea (being a Djangonaut) and foresee very good things with the direction ScottGu & co are taking the Asp.Net MVC framework.
That’s one side of things. The second side is trying to see if Analytical Services is a good idea for me. I want to learn about data cubes, as if I can set them up correctly, it would save me from writing some of the simpler reports for certain applications. There’s a lot to learn, especially involving real-world processes and how this ties in with data mining (which will be the topic of our next Lunch & Learn at work, so I’m jazzed about that—especially because I picked it…). There are a lot of good Analytical Services resources available, and I’ll be going through several of them. MSDN has a forum for the topic, which I’m sure I’ll be using. Microsoft’s Codeplex also has some code samples, and because I already have the AdventureWorks database at home, I believe that there are some scripts already available. Even if not, I can work with some tutorials and develop a practice cube. And again, when in doubt, go to MSDN.
It’s a lot of reading, and I don’t get overtime for reading (well, at least I haven’t tried it yet…) but it would be awesome to put some of this stuff together. Even though I don’t really want to go down the DBA/business analysis development route, they’ll make my life easier at work and help out the resume, so it’ll be worth it.
Tomorrow after Shabbat, I’ll put out a list of links that I’ve found helpful over the last couple of days, now that I’ve gotten through a couple of performance issues.
