22 March 2002

I'm on this project at work. Right now we're supposed to be in what's called the "design phase" - which means that we're supposed to be working out the details of how the project will work without actually writing the code.

I've spent the last week or so working on the database and the wrapper for it. I haven't, I confess, been working particularly hard.

So yesterday, we had a meeting. The technical lead for the project, Ted, went over the various pieces to make sure we weren't forgetting anything, then asked for my report.

I explained what I'd done so far, and asked a stack of technical questions I'd built up - things that needed to be decided on by the whole team. That took about fifteen minutes, and then I was done.

Ted looked at me. "What about the user interfaces?"

"User interfaces?"

He nodded. "I thought you were going to design the two user interfaces."

Oh. Yeah. I'd completely forgotten about them.

Now, I'm a whiz with user interfaces, but it's still not instantaneous. I'm looking at about four days' worth of work, there.

On top of that, there's documentation that has to be done - diagrams and tables to create. All of this has to be done by next Thursday. One week. I have one week to do about six days' worth of work. Yay.

I've finally figured out the broad shape of the climax of this story - now I just have to write it. I'm not very good at writing blow-by-blow action scenes (mostly because I hate reading blow-by-blows) - but this particular scene actually needs it. So I imagine it will take a few re-writes before I get it up to snuff.

I'm thinking of going ahead and posting the first section of the story at the website, and then updating with the subsequent sections every few days. (Not that it matters much - there's only about two people who read these things, and I've already sent it to one of them.)

--Liz