I got me a work-related rant today! 
Last week, I had a mini-panic attack because about an hour before I headed home for the day, I got CC'd on a new project seemingly out of nowhere. No mention from the higher-ups about new projects coming in, nor that I'd be put on it. I just got some data back from some user testing on another project that had been floating in limbo for effectively three months, so I was already trying to remember what I had coded in that previous project before having a whole new thing to worry about.
It's one of the departments trying to use up the last of their budget, so it's a last-minute project with a strict deadline. How strict? It's due mid-April - they want an application, written from scratch, in a month. And when I went into the meeting, it was just me, the Project Manager, and the database guy. Which - to me - meant "one-man coding job due in a month."
Turns out that I'm getting one other person to help me with it, and it's a... relatively?... simple application (no personal information or anything that needs to be encrypted). Still, I do not appreciate the panic attack followed by thinking I'm writing up an entire application by myself in a month.
To help things along, the Project Manager suggests we scavenge bits from the other projects we have. I get put on doing the Login page - sure thing, that'll be easy, right? She seems to think so, sets a tentative deadline of having something put together by the end of the day. So, I pull up the last project I worked on with a login page and...
Well, it's a mess. A bunch of multipurpose classes with a lot of extra stuff I don't know if I need, a web control that refuses to work with me due to Ajax hating me, and a confusing CSS layout that works on that application's pages, but not this new one. I literally spent over an hour trying to get it to work before going to the PM asking if there was another application with a simpler login page we could steal since we don't need much.
Get referred to another guy. Find out that, despite all the applications that have been written here, there's only TWO that have "simple" logins - and the one I was banging my head against was one of them. Oh, and the other's more complex. So I got to fight with the login page again - having removed all the junk I had added in attempts to get it working on the belief that we'd have another login page format that wouldn't need all of it.
So I got to copy all that over again and redo the adjustments. Ultimately ended up dropping the web control entirely and replacing it with something I hope will work. I say hope because we have no dummy login data and the "main page" isn't even built yet (the other guy's supposed to be working on that, PM almost tried to shove that work on me in return for the other guy "helping" with my login page issues) so I can't make sure it or the Stored Procedure I wrote will work as intended.
All I can really do now is work on the basic "Forgot Password?" page - which I know I coded myself in the previous project (as seen by its simplistic format) - and hope that what I have with the Login is good enough for now. And wait for the inevitable changes I'll need to make. Sigh.
Last week, I had a mini-panic attack because about an hour before I headed home for the day, I got CC'd on a new project seemingly out of nowhere. No mention from the higher-ups about new projects coming in, nor that I'd be put on it. I just got some data back from some user testing on another project that had been floating in limbo for effectively three months, so I was already trying to remember what I had coded in that previous project before having a whole new thing to worry about.
It's one of the departments trying to use up the last of their budget, so it's a last-minute project with a strict deadline. How strict? It's due mid-April - they want an application, written from scratch, in a month. And when I went into the meeting, it was just me, the Project Manager, and the database guy. Which - to me - meant "one-man coding job due in a month."
Turns out that I'm getting one other person to help me with it, and it's a... relatively?... simple application (no personal information or anything that needs to be encrypted). Still, I do not appreciate the panic attack followed by thinking I'm writing up an entire application by myself in a month.
To help things along, the Project Manager suggests we scavenge bits from the other projects we have. I get put on doing the Login page - sure thing, that'll be easy, right? She seems to think so, sets a tentative deadline of having something put together by the end of the day. So, I pull up the last project I worked on with a login page and...
Well, it's a mess. A bunch of multipurpose classes with a lot of extra stuff I don't know if I need, a web control that refuses to work with me due to Ajax hating me, and a confusing CSS layout that works on that application's pages, but not this new one. I literally spent over an hour trying to get it to work before going to the PM asking if there was another application with a simpler login page we could steal since we don't need much.
Get referred to another guy. Find out that, despite all the applications that have been written here, there's only TWO that have "simple" logins - and the one I was banging my head against was one of them. Oh, and the other's more complex. So I got to fight with the login page again - having removed all the junk I had added in attempts to get it working on the belief that we'd have another login page format that wouldn't need all of it.
So I got to copy all that over again and redo the adjustments. Ultimately ended up dropping the web control entirely and replacing it with something I hope will work. I say hope because we have no dummy login data and the "main page" isn't even built yet (the other guy's supposed to be working on that, PM almost tried to shove that work on me in return for the other guy "helping" with my login page issues) so I can't make sure it or the Stored Procedure I wrote will work as intended.
All I can really do now is work on the basic "Forgot Password?" page - which I know I coded myself in the previous project (as seen by its simplistic format) - and hope that what I have with the Login is good enough for now. And wait for the inevitable changes I'll need to make. Sigh.
~