Yesterday Deadlines
Sorry about that. I think that must be the longest non-blogging period this site has ever seen.
What happened? Customers and their pesky deadlines, that's what happened.
There I was happily plodding away developing when I'm called to an emergency meeting between me, my customer and their customer (at, of all places, a service station on the M1, midway between all three of us). The matter at hand being how my customer's customer had announced their new product to the their customers the day before we met and they wanted to know why the bit I was working on wasn't in it.
They literally wanted it done yesterday.
Without getting in to what happened, let me just say it wasn't really my fault. If I'm given a deadline I do everything in my power to deliver to it.
That said, I'm the bottom of the pecking order in the chain of command, so it was still my problem. That's why since last Tuesday I've been working flat out trying to deliver, which I did yesterday.
The Rockall philosophy is "Keep the customer happy, whatever the cost!". Happy customers come back for more.
I always try to keep customers happy even if it means swallowing my pride and/or biting my tongue.
The project itself was an interesting (read challenging) one - Notes and reporting! As soon as I heard the two words uttered in the same breath I knew we'd have to get the data out of Notes. What I built was a Flex-based reporting front end with a PHP/MySQL backend. The data is synched by a scheduled PHP script which connects from one server to another (same LAN) using HTTP requests for the data as XML. It can sync ~200,000 documents in about 10 minutes.
Although I didn't learn much from a business perspective (being sporadically overwhelmed with work is all part of the game) I did learn plenty about SQL, Flex and PHP. Some of which I hope to share with you all in due course.
Have a nice weekend.
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I feel your pain... currently we're pressing to meet a schedule of our own - and the last few bits are proving more time consuming than I expected. Sanity still hangs by a thread though, so as long as I've got that.... *snap!*
Don't worry, Jake. We still love you for sure. At least I do. No, that's a bad comment. Everybody does!
Thank you for still providing us with so much valuable and entertaining info after all these years. You are a top class hero, not just because I'm a little drunk right now.
Hi Jake,
Don' worry !
You make us all too much for a long time.
The time that things will accommodate, ok ?
Greetings ;)
Keeping customers happy at all cost is a very slippery slope. Sometimes you have to insist on keeping agreements. There seems to be the "Enterprise idea*" floating around that empowers customers to expand scope or cut deadlines. If you give in there you *will* be taken for a ride.
Recommended reading: Getting to YES.
* Enterprise idea: "Kirk asks: how long does it take to fix. Scotty says: 6h, Kirk replies: you got 1. Scotty delivers." - works in a TV show, but kills you (you are Scotty) in real live.
Hi Jake,
I sure would be interested in hearing what / how you did the integration of flex, php and mysql. I'm about to convert a large quickplace site to a flex front end with a mysql backend and php in the middle.
I'd love to hear the good the bad and the ugly so to speak. . .
thanks for all that you do !!!!
STeveR
If you are an independent or quasi-independent contractor, then the need to keep the customer happy at all costs above and beyond your strict profitability/pride metrics is well understood. It's an unfortunate side-effect of the (mode of) business we are in. Glad you came out of it with your humor and sanity intact. All I can say is been there ,done that and ouch!