Teleidoscope

Wed, Aug 15, 2007

Potato Chip Code

Posted at 10:36 am MDT to Code

I'm developing a new section for the company's internal website using the Perl HTML::Template and CGI::Application Packages and various plugins for
CGI::Application. I haven't used any of these powerful and flexible modules before, so I'm learning as I go. The documentation on some of the modules is a little sketchy, but things are beginning to shape up well.

I've got authentication (login/logout) and authorization (different people can do different things) in place, display modules for three of the four main data tables and infrastructure for a lot of the rest. This application is going to have about 25 functions accessible from various menus, but most of them involve doing similar things to various DB tables, so development goes fairly quickly. Once I get something working for one data type, adding the same function for the other three databases goes fairly quickly.

Yesterday I started work at about 9:00 AM and stopped at 2:00am, so I am fairly groggy today. A couple of hours of that was dealing with the phone company when my DSL went down, but a lot of it was googling for information and coding. I find developing code is like eating potato chips: There is always one more tweak to try. And until there is a reason to stop, I don't. It doesn't matter that I'm disrupting my sleep cyclethis week, since I'll be in Boston next week: disrupting my cycle now may actually decrease the effects of jet lag.

This is one reason I prefer being a consultant: the contracts put sane limits on how many hours I end up working in a day or week, so I don't burn myself out when I'm working on an interesting project.

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