I’ve recently begun to tackle the last major milestone in the initial development cycle of this software I’m working on – that of reporting. It’s something that all good business intelligence applications have, and is arguably one of the most important parts of the system. I mean, imagine if you could use a system but not print anything from it? No records, no reports, no anything? It would seem rather crippled, wouldn’t it?
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I’ve just been busy. Really busy. Mostly writing code with a little teaching thrown in for variety, while also doing my part hanging out with other volunteers who come to town.
Pretty much the reason I haven’t written much of anything in the last couple months since I got back from Italy, is because every day is basically the same. Yes, even the weekends. Get up, shower, let Rhythm out, set up my laptop, and work until about 4 in the afternoon. Pack stuff up, go to Omar’s to get some late lunch (hopefully his chicken stew or benachin, my favorites on Tuesday and Wednesday), then head to the office to check email and do some research to find solutions to problems I ran into earlier in the day. After that, I head home, where I usually resume where I left off, and keep coding until about midnight, but sometimes I’ve gone as late as three in the morning.
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(sorry, I’ve been missing my Megatokyo…)
Boy, I never know when they’re gonna hit, but when they do they’re pretty intense. I’ve been in the middle of another coding binge for the last five or six days, pulling 10 – 12 hour stretches from morning until night, with short reprises to walk over to the office to get online to do some research, check email, get lunch, and just stretch the legs a bit. But let me tell you, I’ve made some killer progress on this app in the last week.
Where’ve I been, you ask? It’s been weeks since my last post, I’ve been slow to respond with emails – I mean heck, it’s almost like I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, so to speak. Well, that obviously hasn’t happened, but what has happened is that I’ve dived head-first into a multi-week coding binge from which I’ve still yet to surface for anything more than a brief moment to get a breath of air, and then I’m back at it.
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…if you come to The Gambia: they’re awful. Besides the fact that there are just a few of them scattered around the country (to my knowledge, there are three in Kombo, and one in Basse), they suffer from more problems than I’ve ever seen with ATMs back home.
Yeah, that’s right baby! I’ve got a box at my home now. Built it from old broken computers at GTTI and convinced the administration there to let me bring it home to do work. They were thrilled with that idea, as several weeks ago I had submitted a request for a computer, which would have meant they’d have to spend money they don’t really have. This way, I’ve taken broken computers and made one working system from them that I can now use. Something from nothing – not too bad, eh?
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I’ve been spending too much time focusing on plans for two years in the future. Thoughts about grad school, where I’ll live, what I’ll do, so on and so forth has pulled my attention away from where it ought to be focused. Granted, I haven’t had more than my classes at GTTI to think about work-wise, but in an interest to prepare for the eventuality of starting this Statehouse gig (which supposedly should start soon!), I started some initial design for the app, and spent some time deciding on the system’s likely technological structure.
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Hey mom, here’s that post you’ve been waiting for 
. This is GTTI, the Gambia Technical Training Institute. They have divisions in different areas of Kombo, but I work at their Kanifing location. I currently teach several sessions of an Introductory C Programming course three days a week, but that should soon be augmented with two other courses, one in Internet Development, and one in Windows Application Development.
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This is a test email post, to ensure that I can actually update my blog without going through the administrative interface. It’ll be much easier to post this way when I go abroad in a few days, so gotta work out the kinks now instead of later.
Attached to this email you should see a map of The Gambia, the West African country I’ll be going to with the Peace Corps next week.
for grins: italicized, bold, underlined
I found this a while back on Slashdot. It’s a really fantastic (and very tongue-in-cheek) guide to securing your place as a software developer in any place of employment.