Today I began working on the new contract I negotiated last Friday. It’s fun to be mired up to my neck in diagrams, surrounded by pieces of paper with important pieces of information, and waist deep in someone else’s program code. The first assignment was fairly straight forward, except that it had several interesting aspects associated with it.

• There is no development or test website. Any changes I make are immediately visible to the world. I broke the site several times during the day, so if anyone was trying to use the area of the website where I was working, they had an interesting experience.
• The method for connecting to the website has a very short timeout … around 90 seconds. I spent a lot of time logging in over and over again.
• All of the logs are locked down and aren’t visible to me. Consequently I have no access to any error messages.

In spite of all that, though, the work got done, it looks good, and does what the client wants to have done. I think I’ll be doing some more work on that website, so maybe I need to build a place to do some testing. I had a lot of fun being back in the programming mode once again.

TTFN!