Day: September 14, 2016

I got some very good feedback for my GUI design this week and it has been passed on to some other team members to code it. There has been a recurring discussion amongst the team about switching development technologies. The company technology officer appears to have a vendetta against proprietary software and Microsoft in particular. This coupled with the fact we’re using visual studio 2010 and don’t appear to have an upgrade in the near future has led the team to ponder other languages and techs. The main one in everyone’s head is java, but some others have been discussed. The MEAN stack is another topic that our senior programmer seems to be really excited about. This tech is mainly the concept of using MongodDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and NodeJS together to make full stack applications. As part of this curiosity I’ve been tasked with learning about angular, making an app using it, and presenting my findings to the team. I’ve never used angular but it’s very common so I’m excited.

I finished an SSIS package that updates our historical data as deleted using our data sources deleted and archived records. I also did some work fixing bugs in the application which allows me to be more experienced with the code base. I’ve also finished the new GUI for the template and I’m currently awaiting feedback.

I finished my work for TPS involving marking deleted data. I’ve also been frantically trying to understand the changes that happened in the 4 months I’ve been gone. Something I didn’t think about with this change to TPS is our existing data. We have months of processed data that people rely on, so we can’t update our application and delete our data and start fresh, this means any changes we made need to be rectified in the old data. My job now is figuring out how to mark our historical data as deleted. I also finished an initial design for our template GUI and presented it. It was nice being able to present something and get feedback and talk about ideas, now I have more details about what we need which is nice. And also, more training.

So the main concern with TPS currently is technical debt. In it’s current state every time transportation data changes, be it the whole load or one order, the entire freight move is re saved and re evaluated leading to a lot of duplicated data. The large amount of data we’re saving has slowed down our database, and caused our program to use excessive amounts of ram. Presently TPS works almost as a bulk operation; getting 30 days of freight move data and processing it, then analyzing and saving it if needed, the dream would be to have the application work freight move by freight move, however there is a lot of work involved in that and frankly we don’t have time, so we need another plan. This plan is to only save data that has changed, which seems obvious but it has a lot of implications given our current design. Our main concerns now is how to do we we build a freight move given data with multiple revisions on separate executions, and when do we evaluate this data and how? My main concern is about deleted data, mainly determining if any data has been deleted, and deciding what we do after this discovery. In non TPS related news the template project has begun, my job here is to create a GUI design in Photoshop and present it to the team. There was also more training this week.

I feel I should talk about my goals for this term. Considering I am returning I want to be given more responsibility; maybe even lead a project. I also think this term would be the perfect opportunity for me to work on my communication skills. I know everyone on the team and I’m comfortable here so there shouldn’t be any problems with me sharing concerns and ideas or asking questions. And as always I want to learn as much as possible about software development and specifically OOP. The TPS project was released to production shortly after I left last term and apparently it has been going well. The only somewhat major problem they had was an issue resulting from an assumption they made about our underlying data source; more specifically they thought one piece of information was unique and suitable for a primary key, when in fact this wasn’t the case. They have rectified the problem with a hot fix release while I was at school however their is some outstanding work remaining to fully assimilate the new column (an application generated key) into TPS. There was also some training sessions this week which I found sort of ironic since I’ve been with the team for about a 12 months total, but it’s good for the other new co-op Ranjith and it’s a good idea for future employees.

My first week back. I had to go to another orientation which wasn’t very fun. It was a lot of the same but luckily this time they had some new speakers which was cool, and it is easy money so I won’t complain. I found out that I will be working on the TPS project again which is exciting, as well as another project where I will develop a web application template. I’m interested in this project for a couple of reasons: first it’ll be cool to work on something else besides TPS, and second it’s different from anything I’ve done before. I was also able to meet my new manager Jose Vera, who took over from Jonathan Fink, as well as my new team lead Mike Hucal who took over from Tim Gladwell shortly after I left. Jose Vera used to work on this very team as a programmer and I’m given to understand that he’s the team’s first manager with a thorough programming background which is exciting. It was nice to see all the familiar faces again and I’m excited to get to back to work; given my background with the team and the projects I am able to dive right in which is exciting. Time to make the most of these short 4 months.