Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Programming

I really love programming. My job as a programmer brings me a lot of satisfaction. Some days I will voluntarily skip my lunch and work through it because I am so enthusiastic about a problem I am talking that I cannot bring myself to part from it.
On days that I am making good progress I enjoy my job the most. Tackling a lot of problems gives me a really big energy boost that I carry with me. Being able to take things I don't know anything about and quickly whipping them into shape has been one of my specialties. Just two weeks ago I took an application that two others had been trying to port to our new system without success, and I knocked it out in four hours, even though I had no experience with the application or the technology it runs on.
So this week I am back on a project that I had started when I first got this job. This project is a complete rewrite of an application that runs on an IBM mainframe. It is a large task that will end up taking well over six months once it is completed. The problem is that right now I am stuck. I have tried understanding a current process so I can duplicate it in our new system. After a lot of work and research I still don't understand the process very well. It is complicated and in large doesn't make a lot of sense. I have been making such little progress for so long that it is affecting my ability to focus. I find distraction everywhere. I can look to anything to get my mind off of the impossible task.
For most of the week I have put a lot of priority on to smaller "back burner" projects that aren't suppose to get much attention right now. Today I have committed to getting myself back on track so I can tackle this final road block. Once this road block is done our IBM rewrite will almost be 100% complete and I can claim victory over this large project. But mustering myself up to tackle this final challenge may prove to be the real challenge. UGH!

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