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Issue 18
 Angie finds traces of an old enemy, deals with Ed’s split personality and sees Carl and Denny take on a central role, in the diary of a systems consultant.
Monday
Those TEL Integration planning meetings in Paris are a distant memory now, after two months stuck here churning out specs and code. I never thought I’d say this, but thank goodness for Ed, the Genuine XML Expert, who’s taken the whole data integration thing off my hands and is doing a great job. Denny says that with my DCOM skills and Ed’s XML, we make the perfect couple and should get married, although I’ve warned him that he won’t make 35 if he repeats it in front of Ed. As it happens, the original perfect couple (Denny and Carl) were dragged in first thing this morning by Mike, who’s back from a WinCE 3.0 conference in Amsterdam. Programming palmtops isn’t exactly the Server-Side Superstars’ thing, so perhaps he’s just going to sack them. Am I turning cynical in my old age?
Tuesday
I think Ed may be suffering from a split personality - on XML he’s skilled and professional, on anything else he’s his old useless self. I can’t avoid giving him some non-XML work, and it’s difficult having to haul him up for stupid VB mistakes one minute, then congratulate him for his XML wizardry the next. His latest disaster involves using ADOX to flood the Allowances schema with temporary tables, despite being banned from doing so. I try to be stern, but he knows we can’t afford to lose his XML expertise, and in ‘old Ed’ mode he milks that for all it’s worth. It seems we won’t be losing Carl and Denny either, as they’re now walking round with big grins on their faces and refusing to tell me what going on. Sometimes I miss being a Senior Developer, with just the DA client to worry about.
Wednesday
At last I’m starting on the Paris engineers’ upgrade (or ‘Angie’s bit on the side’, as C and D call it). The poor engineers are so desperate that they’ve agreed to Mike’s zillions-per-hour rate for my services, and I’ve got two days to spec the changes. What I haven’t bargained for, though, is the nasty shock waiting in the source files. An anonymous developer has already tried to change my code, and from the clumsiness of the mods it just has to be Kate, my (thankfully) ex-colleague at InterDesign A. Feeling less sorry for the engineers (who forgot to mention this), I mail Didier to say that I’ll have to scrap the current system and rebuild from the original. Looking back at the source, I see that Kate’s used ADOX to modify the schema. Kate and ‘old Ed’ - now there really is a perfect match!
Thursday
Carl and Denny are now looking so smug that I break off from reading Didier’s sorrowful reply (“This will cost us many more Euros, n’est ce pas?”) to demand that they spill the beans. They reply that “non-essential staff will be informed in due course”, and I get my revenge by pointing out that I’m offline again today, so they’ll have to sort out Ed’s urgent COM+ Constructor String problem. I also try to goad them about WinCE by pinning a review of Embedded Visual Studio on the wall, but they just smile serenely and say nothing. They then disappear off for a secret-agenda meeting with the big bosses, something which I admit I’ve come to see as my territory. I’m suddenly outside the charmed circle, and I don’t particularly like it.
Friday
We’ve been promised a big announcement, which I guess is about whatever Carl and Denny are doing. Sure enough, Mike and Greg appear with the dynamic duo in attendance, but the subject matter isn’t WinCE. Instead they say that the TEL Consortium’s French partner has admitted that its scheduler package, the backbone of the Integrated system, can’t be adapted in the agreed timescale, if at all. We’ve stepped into the breach, and the entire TEL system will now be based around a modified version of our own Customer Auto Scheduling, with the designers of CAS, Carl and Denny, acting as Lead Development Consultants. As the original TEL consultant I’m still theoretically the senior project member, but the truth is that I’ve been upstaged, and we all know it. As I shake my new TEL colleagues’ hands I feel strangely like a senior developer again.
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Issue 18 - Contents
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Issue 1
Issue 2
Issue 3
Issue 4
Issue 5
Issue 6
Issue 7
Issue 8
Issue 9
Issue 10
Issue 11
Issue 12
Issue 13
Issue 14
Issue 15
Issue 16
Issue 17
Issue 18
Issue 19
Issue 20
Issue 21
Issue 22
Issue 23
Issue 24
Issue 25
Issue 26
Issue 27
Issue 28
Issue 29
Issue 30
Issue 31
Issue 32
Issue 33
Issue 34
Issue 35
Issue 36
Issue 37
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