I have now been at this day job for 6+ months and I am finally feeling like I know what is going on. 

Usually with a new job, where I am writing software, you learn about the project and application the while working. But now, I am not writing code 100% of the time; I am also supervising a team in India plus two other contractors based here in the USA and are also remote. Then there are all the meetings I attend for planning and communications - I am not use to all this and it has taken me time to adjust.

I currently spend most mornings in meetings with a half hour to an hour+  in-between where I can get some "work" done. Then I have lunch and maybe another meeting after that. I have "dark time for Laurie" from either 2 or 3 pm every day where I can take care of my actual coding work. This is not to say that I am not working in all those meetings; it is just a different type of work. 

So what is it I do during my work (dark) time?   I write business requirement documents (BRD's); writing test scripts and testing code; planning for deployments and releases; and actually writing code which is very very little compared to prior jobs. 

On the other side of this, I work a normal 8 - 5 day though some days I work through lunch only because I don't want to stop what I am doing (and I am nibbling my lunch while I do it)

Plus I am not stressed which means I have am not having the pains in my chest like I use to.  Actually I have not had a chest pain in several months (watch, I have just jinked myself) 

I am ready lots of books and really enjoying my new-ish studio and I have even begun, again, teaching some metal classes. 

And come Thanksgiving weekend, I start my countdown to retirement. I may not retire when I hit full retirement age but then I will have more options to work at a day job full time, part time or not at all and spend all my time either on weaving, knitting, quilting, temari, or metals. 

Before I start telling you about the past two months at work, can you name this tune, shown above in c# code?? You will find the answer is at the bottom!

I have now been at the  new job, new position, and new company for two months and it ls has flown by.

I am a Senior Software Developer on a project for the Air Force at the Lackland Air Force Base. I am on a team that is responsible for 3 different applications. 

The application I am working on was developed 15+ years ago and the code base is (STILL) what was used 15+ years ago - CLASSIC ASP! This technology was in vogue back starting in 1996 and yes I worked with it, thankfully it was not Visual Basic 3, which I also know.  Gosh, I am old! 

The company has won a 5 year contract to TOTALLY UPGRADE this application, YIPPEE.

What I have been tasked with has been building out the application framework.  So far I have accomplished the following:

• Creating a Windows virtual machine with a local Oracle 12C database.  This is so all the developers can code and test in a local sand box. 
• Create the application solution with Visual Studio 2017 and figure out how to get it to work with Oracle 12C. Since we want to use Entity Framework and EF and Oracle don't play well together regarding Store Procedures, we decided to use a blended solution of EF for distinct table Select, Update, Add and Delete operations and then use old school database calls for stored procedures that return reference cursors.  I also built out a library to do this with the Oracle Managed Data Access libraries.
• Using ASP.Net and MVC vs classic ASP and Frames. Oh the FRAMES! I now hate frames, frames are on the voodoo doll. "Those people" went frame crazy; there are framesets that use other framesets and so on so and once you get to the actual frame that displays pages, only one page is displayed and the other page is empty; OY is an understatement.   We will use a main layout page and minimal partial views and mostly single views. 
• Since this is a government application the users will use their government smart cards to be authenticated and authorized. There are libraries in ASP.NET/MVC that can handle individual authentication and authorization (ASP.NET Identity Core) but I had to customize the system to: 
  • Work with not only Oracle
  • Work with non-standard tables. 
  • Work with the smart card certificate. 
• Build out the new application organization and naming conventions. The old application is a mishmash of various web sites and the physical location of files and folders does not match what you see in the development environment. 
• Unit Tests. We will do unit tests on all the modules and for that I am currently writing a testing framework using Moq. There is talk of using Nject too but I have not needed it yet. 
• Regression Tests. We will do full regression tests which is possible to do with Visual Studio Enterprise edition, which only a few team members will have as they will be responsible for the testing. 

So here is out tech stack:

• .NET Framework v: 4.7.2
• ASP.Net/MVC v: 5.2.5
• Entity Framework v: 6.2
• Oracle Database v: 12.2.0.1
• Oracle Managed Data Access v: 12.2.1100
• Oracle Managed Data Access Entity Framework v: 12.2.1100
• Bootstrap v: 4.1.3
• jQuery v: 3.3
• jQueryUI v: 1.12.1
• Moq v: 4.10.0
• Automapper v: 7.0.1

Looking back over these two months I can tell you that I am really enjoying the work; I am busy every day, I am very challenged, and I am doing some cool development, my ideas and recommendations are listened to and as a team we work out a solution. Looking back at my time at Rush I am not saying that I hated it; I am saying that I was not fully engaged and not challenged for the work I was doing and I felt that my ideas and thoughts on how to improve things did not matter by upper management (my manager, Jesse, did but his hands were tied).

ANSWER: the tune is Bohemian Rhapsody, 'cause who doesn't like ​Bohemian Rhapsody,  Bohemian Rhapsody, and of course Bohemian Rhapsody. 

Yesterday was my last day at my "current" job, Monday I start the "new" job.
I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this past week working remotely and I use the term work very loosely; so I could use up my vaction time. Why? well the company, does not payout any vacation time that is on the books. They considered it a reward but not something that is earned but that is not why I left.

When I took the position, back in May of 2017, I knew the position was not going to make good use of my skill set but we wanted to leave California so I accepted the offer and we were able to move.

When I started the position, last May, I had a lot of applications to learn and how everything worked. Yet I was confident that I would be able to show off my skill set and would be able to take on upgrading/redesigning some of the applications that were over 10 years old; some just had really old technology others were poorly written.

After a year and several events that just boggled my mind,  I came to realize that not only was that NOT going to happen; I realized the upper management does not see IT as a opportunity but a necessity and only funds and staff what they think is required to keep the systems up and running.

It was time for me to look for a new position.   

I am not going to detail everything I said in my exit interviews but my manager and his manager did not disagree with my opinions.  And so at 3:30 pm, I walked out the door of the building a drove away.

Monday, I will drive to San Antonio to begin a new chapter at the new company.

Last week I wrote a tool, in c# to convert SQLServer create table scripts to a format that could be used by PostgreSQL.  

Why did I write the tool and not just do it by hand? Well, there are over 250 tables (266 to be exact) in the database we need to migrate. 

Why not use a tool? Ha, I wish!
I am working on a secure network and getting an application that on the network takes FORE_EVER!
Not only has the application have to be approved to be on the network, getting a paid license takes months and then we have to get it installed. All in all, the process would take 6 months if we were lucky.  

So I figured out what had to be changed and wrote an app that uses regular expressions to find/replace the reserved words and data types and output a new file, one for each table. The app took 2 days to write and a day to run. Now my new database has 226 empty tables. 

On to the next problem... 

I have spent this week working on a tool, yes another one, in c#, to migrate the data from the SQLServer db to the ready and waiting PostgreSQL db. Why am I writing a tool when many exist? See the above reason for that tool and you will get the idea, again.  

Yes, there is an ODBC driver which would allow me to use the SQLServer tools to push it from our SQLServer db into the new PostgresDB.   But we are having 'problems' getting that installed too.

SO write the app I did.  
I started it Wednesday and was completed yesterday afternoon.  I have done some preliminary test and so far it looks like it will do the job. Monday, I will start to test with one table and if that works, I will run it against the entire db.  

In other news - 
And I am still playing with Electron. I am now looking at framework that uses the React Javascript library - "React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces."

And to that end I have installed the framework named Electron-Forge with the --template=react parameter. Now I have to learn how to use it. And while that is going on I have selected the NoSQL/JSON package named lowdb I will use for the database storage.   Time to get back to the codesmithing

Way back in the olden days of yore, I learned to program in Algol, Cobal and Fortran IV - with punch cars on a Univac 1108.  And I HATED IT.
I may have been due to having aixelsyd (that's dyslexia, to a dyslexic) or maybe what we were being taugh had no connection to my current situation and thus I couldn't relate to it. It was, what it was. 

Then back in the early 90's I purchased a copy of Visual Basis and I learned the basics of it in about a week. YES, I found that I actually liked writing code and could do it well. 

Fast forward 20+ years to now and I am still working with Microsoft technologies with a bit of Oracle, PostgreSQL, Photoshop, Illustrator, XML, JavaScript and more thrown in. 

But the world of code is changing and I must too. For the past month or so I have been learning the new JavaScript technologies which allow applications and websites to be portable to any operating system.  I so far have focused on Node JS, and Express JS and along the way the Atom editor.  I have also written my first mini website in Node and Express using Bcrypt which is a tool to encrypt and validate passwords. Hey, I even pushed it to GitHub where I am now learning about projects and issues.  Whew! 

Next I am going to expand my skill set with AngularJS - a web framework; NoSQL - which is another database type of which I have to select a specific implementation; and then Electron - a way to create desktop application using Node JS technologies that will run on almost any desktop.

WHY - hey, I got ideas for a few applications and this seems a good way to get two things done at once! 

I have transferred to another project at the day job. Same company, different project, team, manager and location.  And now that I have been there several weeks, Erich and I have noticed a couple of things. 

• I feel almost NO stress
• I sleep better
• I am certainly not as tired when I get home at the end of the day
• I want to sit and talk to Erich when I get home and NOT disappear to someplace quiet and alone
• Creativity is oozing out of me.
• I am really happy

I think you can easily imagine the items 2- 4 occurring due to the first item on the list. But the 5th item was a big surprise to me and the 6th is a wonderful bonus. 

How do I know.. I am wanting to learn new things, play at experimenting with patina's, making new bowls, writing new software for the fun of it (Yeah, I do that).

And here is why I think this has happened - look at item ONE on the list. STRESS. There are plenty of studies that show long term stress is not good for us, go look it up. But I don't think many people recognize the changes in them when it is gone. We can work to reduce stress and these gradual changes might not be as apparent.

BUT when it GOES AWAY suddenly, it is amazing what can happen mentally; I think the physical changes do take a bit more time to occur and be noticed.

This is why I am calling it the unbearable noise of stress. It was a constant grating sound that blocked all sorts of ideas, thoughts, and emotions.

When I would take a vacation, I could feel it start to lift and then returned to work and it was back.
Over weekends and the occasional 3-Day, I would never really get away from it
Going out with friends, the stress of work and work itself became an ongoing topic that even I hated to discuss but it always came up.

And then it was gone. 

And then I noticed it was gone.  

25 years ago I began my real foray into software. 

I say real because I did learn how to program when I was in college but that was disaster.

Yes, I will confess that not only did I hate programming, I failed quite a few of those classes.

I learned to program on a Univac 1108 using punch card and chads. The first language I learned was ALGOL then it was FORTRAN-IV and COBAL.  I could do the logic diagrams that were required as part of our assignments; I could write up what I thought the program should be but being dyslexic and having to type out punch cards did not help either. 

But all those strange problems to be solved (Imagine a bull in a circular field 12 feet diameter and is fenced. The bull is teathered on a 6 foot chain to the fence. What is the area of the pasture that the bull can eat?) had no relevance to anything I was actually doing and so I just "did not get it".

I gave up on programming.

Advance 13 years in time to 1991; I had a programmer working for me and she was modifying the ERP software at the company where I was the manager of manufacturing engineering (a medical startup). Once day I was looking at the code and I was "reading the code" and I realized there was a bug staring me in the face.

WHAAAAA??!!!

I was reading code and I "couldn't do that". Over the next few weeks I realized that even though I had failed those programming classes, I really did know how to program. 

I then came across Visual Basic 1.0 and got a copy to play with plus a teach yourself to program in 21 days type of book.  I went through the book in one weekend and tt was then that I realized that "I GOT IT". 

I never looked back. 

I then went to work at the company that produced the ERP software because we had modified it to meet certain FDA requirements and the software company wanted to go after the medical manufacturing business and what better way than to have a Biomedical Engineer as one of their consultants who had not only worked in that industry but had experience with the software. 

Then I earned my Microsoft certifications and moved into Big-Six consulting (Coopers & Lybrand, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, BearingPoint); then software and engineering consulting and then full on software engineering and software development at various other companies. 

And here we are, this is the 25th anniversary of the release of VB and I have seen it in all it's variations. 

It has been a fun and wild ride. There have been times I have questioned if moving into software was the right move and should I have stayed in manufacturing engineering. BUT, then again maybe not as I have been able to learn so much, traveled so many places, and it has paid me really really well.

I am a bit tired these days. 

Between the day job and the silversmithing (FB group, teaching, making, writing blogs...), it is like having TWO jobs. NO - it IS two jobs

It does not help that the day job has become hectic again. Not only am I fixing bugs but I am rewriting 5 modules that I have taken over; I am the Git lead so I am answering questions from other developers on other projects; and all of us are discussing and figuring out how to add some new functionality to the app - some of which has to be integrated back into the already released modules.  

Today I am having lunch with a friend and we will both do a bit of griping about work and I plan on resting this weekend.  

Hopefully next week will be less stressful and I can get back into my groove.

I have been at the new job/project for two weeks now. And this is what is outside the building I work in.

YUP, that is the USS Midway and a few other Carriers that are currently in port, in the San Diego harbor. 

Been busy. So read along and catch up with what has been going on.

The live project at work is humming along. I have only had to make a few minor tweaks on a screen that I was not happy with. No, not a bug. 

I am also starting a new job. Not just a new project - a new JOB. I am changing companies.  I have been with my current company for 5+ years and I do like working for them. I like the people I am working for and supporting them.  And yet… I new project was going to start soon and I was to lead it but then this offer came around and I really am a good fit for it, so I took it.  I am now rushing around trying to tie up loose ends and working with my replacement to get him up to speed on what has to be done to finish the application that is 80% completed. 

Oh, and incase you noticed, there is another new banner today. Elisa has been working with her camera again and sent this lovely feather picture along that I thought would a nice change after the icy image I have had up for a few months.

If you have been reading my Adventurous Silversmith blog you can see that I have been busy between a new FB group, doing the prep work to teach a workshop and heading off to take another workshop. 

Whew, I am tired just writing about it.