Thursday: Work and photography

Hmmm, odd how the day starts out and I plan on blogging about the new toys I just ordered and then I get into working and that all goes out the window. 

Quick little "Yay for me!"  I ordered the Canon ST-E2 infrared flash remote controller and a new Canon 420EX flash unit.  I've spent the first year of my photography/camera hobby practicing and learning about portraiture.  I'm still far from producing compelling images as often or as powerfully as I'd like but I'm ready to at least add more dimension to my work and trying to understand lighting seems to be the next step.  To whit, my recent work on the beach in Florida was an attempt to create powerful images based on lighting and composition.  Here's another one from that set:


As for work, man it can get flipped out.  People often have different ways of doing things and with programming and computers multiple ways will get you to the same conclusion but some ways are inherently better than others (they cost less in terms of processing and maintenance).  When you switch responsibility for a project from one person to another sometimes it takes tons more time to just maintain the original code than it would to just write the whole thing over again.  At least it seems that way.  I'm not complaining.  Just noting that I'm maintaining a piece of code that was originally written several years ago and while I'm basically a newbie (I've been programming less than a decade and never in a mainframe setting) I have some pretty strong opinions about using the fastest path to deliver a solution.  Microsoft Access seems to have gained many adherents here at work over a period of time to provide fast solutions.  Now it has fallen out of corporate favor because it is unsecure at its core and designed for no more than 5 users.  It scales like poop (meaning it doesn't work well in anything other than a very small usage).  Trying to wrap my mind around someone who was trying to write code that used Access as its data store while including a mixture of advanced coding techniques (because the coder wanted to do a good job) and then having little band-aids because the business often just wants the application ASAP . . . let me just tell you that its a pain.  Couple that with new projects that the business wants and then toss in a healthy dose of having to revisit code from 7 or 8 months ago and this can get confusing. 

Oh well, at least we have more people on the team and the lines of responsibility are more delineated now so that I actually own the responsibility for something instead of just writing a piece of code for another developer.  Now I feel like I can wrap myself up in some of these projects and become the source of knowledge on what they do, how they work and how we should implement and support them.  Luckily I like to share information with other people so I publish documents that any of my co-workers can use to see in graphical depiction with explanation just how to utilize and support the applications that are my responsibility. 

Thanks for reading,

Kev