Today, I got to be a double agent. What we thought would take an hour or two, took about 8. I should have known better, as I know that I’ve never been able to teach this IVARUM (don’t ask; just an acronym) task to anyone in less than probably 30-40 hours of daily 3 hour sessions. I spent the day acting as the customer—my former employer to describe the issues and the process. I warned them that this process always seems gigantic & overwhelming when first being introduced, but as soon as you understand it, you realize that it’s actually incredibly simple. I won’t bore you with the details of the task, but i’m excited.
Nick did a great job leading the conceptualization of it all, and he asked really great and enthusiastic questions. For a customer, this is actually a really great trait, as people love to tell you about their work, and so i did. He really wanted to understand it all, which is also a good trait for anyone creating software for someone else—I mean it is important for the developers to have a pretty refined image in their minds of what the customer wants otherwise things might not go very well.
At the end of the day, we had a mockup of a UI that the users/engineers would be able to use, and it was simple. In fact, what I was most impressed about was how much going through this process simplified it all. Don’t get me wrong, it is still a complicated process with a lot of variables & in’s & outs, but so see it mocked up like that was pretty astonishing. Like that’s it? There are like 5 manual inputs to the whole process, a few database inputs, and then we spit out the desired results? No special magic or crazy manipulation of anything really; just a mass balance.
What myself, along with countless engineers, have spent hours & hours doing in massive & multiple excel tabs & sheets on a daily basis, not including the hundreds of hours i and the others also put in to trying to automate the whole process in VBA, was deduced down to a a few inputs on a single screen that would then spit out the desired results moments later. And i really believe that we can set up the math in the background to do everything that I had manually been doing in my former life.
I’m excited to show them, and I really hope that they’ll be excited to see it. I’m having a hard time placing myself in their shoes for this. Automating this process is something that every plant manager of that plant has wanted to do, but the engineers did not have the skills for this type of automation nor did they have the time to commit to working with a development team to make one.
I imagined just that today. Today was fun for me, but I imagined working for Honeywell and being tied up all day with contractors trying to build a quote for something i probably still needed to fix for the day. I might think one of two things or both, which are that I’d wonder if we were actually going to invest—especially after we see a price tag for all the things we would want—and two, how much of my time is this going to take? They are not going to get it right away, and I’m going to have to sit on the phone with them for hours trying to explain all this, and they are going to miss all these little details that they just can’t know because they’ve never experienced it.
But I have. I have experienced it, and if they allow I can help to be their voice. They can invest as little or as much time as they want into helping with the vision of this project (and i welcome any input that they may want to give), but they won’t be required to give any more input than the basics and maybe a high level vision and vision approvals, because I’ve already experienced it all and thus share their vision.
I’m excited to the point that I am scared of crashing, but i can’t seem to reel it in, so a no might crush me a little bit—I can be a big girl, but I’m so excited. This is a step toward accomplishing my mission—it is the step in which we lay down the foundation on which we will build a bridge “over the rivers & canyons that inhibit daily task efficiency within my former industry, chemical manufacturing, by implementing my freshly learned and refactored skill-sets that will forge as I work to become the best developer that I can be within my future industry, software.