Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Tuesday Toot - Coding Queen

Hello Mommy Community's newest meme! I have no problem tooting my horn or my family's horn because that's what this blog is all about, right? wink 

This week I want to toot my horn about work. Sure, I get recognition for outstanding work that I have done in the past, like that time I went to our customer's site and miraculously cleared up all the open issues, even the ones where we were scratching our heads and used the big shovel for (and we were not shoveling dirt). After that trip, even the general manager came to congratulate me. Unfortunately, I got pneumonia afterwards and didn't get to revel too much, but at least I fixed the problems before I got sick. 

Well this time, the customer asked for an feature that was planned for a subsequent release of software, and they wanted it in two weeks for a visit from their customer (big name pharmaceutical company that makes a purple blue pill). It was a significant amount of work, which I didn't think could be done in two weeks. I learned early on in software management that when estimating software work, multiply your estimate by 10 times if you're good and multiply by 3 times if you're really good. My estimate including testing was about two weeks, cutting it way too close to the visit. Plus I had just sent my passport in for renewal, so there was no way I could represent our company for the demo in Canada. We managed to push the visit out two more weeks and I set out to write the code last week. And wouldn't you know it? I finished the code and had it tested in four days. And even with my normal slack time built in. I was so proud of myself I had to run to my boss and project manager and toot my horn. Hopefully this won't have a negative impact on future software estimates where I do have to rely on the 3x or 10x factor.

3 comments :

Sunshinelene said...

wow that's an awesome thing to be done in just 4 days. sometimes, we jst really need to trust ourselves that we can do an extraordinary thing. :)

thanks for the viist at my site. see u next tuesday. :)

Anonymous said...

What an awesome accomplishment - Toot -toot-toot! I hope you are feeling better from pneumonia though.

Anonymous said...

You must be superwoman! Good job...software development is something that has always interested me but never got around to. Nice meeting someone who knows her stuff!