Sunshine And Party Pies

All good things must come to an end they say. Tomorrow (or today I guess) is the last day on my current project. It is no exaggeration to say that it’s been one of the two best projects I’ve ever worked on.

After six months of development I’ve managed to see it through to code freeze and although I’d have liked to see it go live, that’s a luxury I will unfortunately miss out on this time. As strange as that sounds, there is nothing like nursing your own creation into production. I’ve always found production support of my own baby far easier than the actual development effort and certainly easier than supporting someone elses. Watching real, live users pounding away at your product is always good for the soul in what can often be a soul destroying lead-up hehehe.

I’ve laid my fair share of turds in the code base, I just hope I’ve obfuscated them well enough. Everyone has worked really hard to keep the code as clean as possible, employing as many checks and tests as we could. There are always things you wished you could have done differently but all in all I think it will survive the ultimate test - maintenence.

Technically, we used constructor based IoC really effectively. We have pretty good unit test coverage. Integration tests are up there too. Functional test coverage is arguably too good but hey I’ll live with that. We have out of container tests, in container tests, automated builds and deployments, code checks, cruise control, you name. Thankfully no one managed to find a way to squeeze any AOP in though they gave it their best shot :-P. In the last couple of days I’ve even been seen partaking in the writing of perl scripts. Oh and of course nothing gave me more pleasure than to see all 10 developers happily writing declarative business rules!

The people I’ve worked with have been just sensational. I’ve certainly learned a lot more than I’ve given especially from people like Mad Dog Murdoch, Uncle Dave with his little nuggets of wisdom (or as he would put it “corn in the stool”) and of course JRO who never ceases to make me realise why I’m just not cut out to be a “Technical Architect”. Marcus, Trashy, Triggles, Phil, Jimmy, Happy, Big Daz, Bazza, Victor and Vorgahan not to mention my backup singers Andwea and Neats. I don’t know how they did it but they all managed to endure my endless singing (if you can call it that) interrupted by bouts of ranting and the occasional tap dance.

It was gratifying to see customers, testers, BAs, developers and management all working together to get this thing out the door. It hasn’t always been easy but then “nuffin is”. In the end though I think pragmatism (along with threats of violence - just kidding) won through and we all just worked to ensure we got the job done.

I’ve quite a bit to digest and hopefully blog about in the coming days and weeks but before that I’m going to get my last 8 (ahem 10?) hours out the way then jump on my motorcycle for a couple of days and enjoy the sunshine that seems to be blessing this lovely city. Come Monday it’s back to work on a new project. For as a wise developer once said “It ain’t all sunshine and party pies.”