Current mood:

accomplished

Decent Day
Today was a pretty decent day. Had an all day meeting with a vendor we're considering purchasing some software from, in order to incorporate it with a new product.

The morning started at 8:30, which for me is miserably early. I know there are those of you for whom this is a late start, but for me that's an hour early. I managed to skate in about 2-3 minutes late due to traffic, but no eyebrows were raised. (And only accomplished this by skipping the shower, which I avoided feeling like a stinkdog by luckily having showered the previous day in the evening.)

Did introductions, I said something which I felt was suitably "What I do and who I am" but my boss added a bit about "Dan is a guy we like to have on new projects because he's able to come up to speed real quick, even if he doesn't know the subject or if he doesn't even know the language." That's rather high praise from a boss that I've had a poor review from in the past. (Add to that a previous comment, where he was giving me my review and fighting for the promotion. I tried to thank him, and he kept telling me, "No, thank you. You've done an amazing job." And so on.) Definitely feeling a lot better about the work situation in regards to the boss.

The new project sounds exciting. I never know how much I can or cannot talk about concerning our products, but I imagine I can tell you that it's an application to rate and score providers of medical treatments on how well they follow a set of guidelines from health care agencies. That's something we've always done in the past, the new bit is the rules logic will now be in a third party vendor's software engine, which will allow people with clinical experience to make the rules instead of us geeky programmers.

It does actually sound pretty exciting, and I think I have a good handle on it. Feeling very "on top of things" in that entire meeting. Amusingly, since I was adding details about how it would all fit together, everyone started to refer to the software that Medstat would write by my name. "And then Dan will take the data here." Eventually I had to make a comment about that, but I imagine that's how it will be referred to during this brainstorm/vendor/meeting/thing.

Definitely are going to be some difficult parts of this process, seems like everyone involved recognizes them, and it does seem like we can conquer them. I feel rather confident. Just one of those days where I enjoy my job immensely.

On a side note: Not done one bit of studying for my MCAD or thought about taking it recently. Heh. Drats! Gotta do that soon before my brain leaks all that info out. Amusingly, this new bit of code will be all Java code. We have to write it on UNIX and Windows, so .NET would not be a good fit. (And we've tried using MONO and it was wayyyy too slow to use for our production code.)

Hey, Rennie. If you've actually managed to read this far down, how hard are the Java certification programs? It never hurts to get another piece of paper to PROVE you know the language, but ... My java is shakier than it should be. And I still have not yet discovered the joys of Eclipse. We're still on JBuilder 7.0, but it might be time to move to Eclipse since so few of us are Java programmers, so it's a bit more difficult to get the company to commit to upgrading our IDE whenever Borland decides it would like a little more money.