I'm modeling!

No, not that kind!

Pretty scary looking huh?

Monday morning, my first day back to full time work, my boss brought me into his office and told me he had a new project for me.

This new project is massive - but could net our company a lot of new clients. I was very excited by what I heard!

He invited the CTO in and they proceeded to tell me about the database I would connect to and some background on the data. They gave me a database schema and the data dictionary. I was to create the database model (such as this picture) and create an initial design for the main page.

I spent all day yesterday entering in the tables (80 of them) and their fields in Microsucks Visio. By the end of the day I entered a little over half of them and realized I hadn't tried to add relationships yet (the lines between the boxes, as shown in the picture). Well, low and behold, I did it all wrong! I entered all the tables as views instead of entities - and as such I couldn't create relationships. Ugh, a whole entire days work down the tubes. I ended up working for about 6 hours last night.

Today I finished the model, showed it to my coworkers who critiqued it for me and I just finished adding their suggestions - its done! Until my boss gets back, of course. So tomorrow I can work on the design for the main page and hopefully have everything done by Friday when my boss and the CTO get back from their client meetings.

What was most interesting about the meeting on Monday was that my boss kept on talking about productivity. We're trying to hire another programmer and its not going too well, they can't find anyone they feel is qualified enough. My boss kept talking about 'picking up the slack' and being more productive, like I'm sleeping on the job or something - at one point he turned to the CTO and asked him if he wanted to comment (almost like he was asking him to add to his productive points). I was slightly insulted by his insinuations. Hopefully its just that he doesn't see how much work I've actually been completing while only part time. So in a way, I feel like this project is a test. I have a lot to do and I have to bring work home again tonight. I don't like bringing work home because I don't get paid for it and frankly, I like to spend that time with Arianna.

Hopefully tonight and tomorrow go better.