August 4, 2005
Where Have You Been
The last 3 months have been a blur for me. After Reagan's birth, I was taken off a new project that was just getting underway to go off and fix a bigger problem. With MeetingPlace being adopted by a bigger customer base at Cisco, the bugs/issues/enchancements started rolling in. Nobody seemed to be paying attention for a while then suddenly, we were getting a bad rap for being the crappiest Cisco product ever. Now the reality is that about every acquisition gets called that and has to get the act together. You might have been doing good at your quality metrics but if those don't match Cisco's (or whoever bought you), then you have work to do.
So I have been off fixing bugs. We had some bad looking quality numbers when I got started and many of those graphs now look like ski slopes with today's values near 0. From week to week, I kept a good average fix rate but the best was 21 in one normal work week. The product has over 1 million lines of code in various languages so it takes a bit of knowledge to work your way through the solutions.
Now the work is mostly done. Last Friday was code freeze for an upcoming maintenance release that should put things back on track. The fun part is the seemingly unrespected bug fixing job gets a lot of day to day attention from the powers that be. Since you directly effect whether they get yelled at by their bosses about quality. And since you get to deal with all the high pressure customer situations.
So with that project going on and the HOA from hell, its been hard to find time to say anything interesting. Plus, we haven't done anything particularly fun and worth chatting about this summer. No trips. With the new baby #2 here, its hard to do things. With #1, you coudl drag them along and pass it back and forth. Zone defense style. Now with 2, its man-to-man and that wears you out. Well, most the time its the kids double-teaming Kim and I just help out when they are getting ready to score. I think that analogy makes sense...
Anyway, I need to get back to ranting and bitching and whining. That is why you read this crap anyway, right?
