This post was originaly published to Stuff the Box on 11 Aug 2012

Work has been amazingly flat chat! We have had so much going on in our little team of engineers/designers.
We recently had a [kinda] spur of the moment project kick-in in February with … a very unique individual as our Project Manager. He was a very different personality, and saying that I clashed with him is possibly the biggest understatement that could be made. In the first week he stole my computer chair. Yeah, that’s right, my fucking computer chair. His reason? The chair he got wasn’t comfortable enough and because I’m young, my back can handle it …

WRONG!

I put him in his place by enlightening him to the fact that I have actually had a minor lower back operation [quite] a few years back, and that the chair I had was one that was suited to me and provided little discomfort. So what did he do? He emailed one of the senior managers saying that due to my “bad back” he gave me his chair and was now using a bad one and was it ok to get a new one?

Yep. That’s what he did.

I responded to the manager correcting this mis-information that he had nicked my chair and been found out and wanted a new one.

Not what I would call a great start to a project …

The project should really have been two (maybe even three) separate ones. But the three components were deemed small enough to encompass together.

Cause, you know:

  • rolling out HDD encryption to the entire organisation (it’s a national, and partly international, organisation … );
  • designing, developing and rolling out a new OS upgrade system;
    and
  • testing and developing a new central software distribution system while redesigning the custom built web-based front end;

… are all reasonably small tasks.

This was to be acheived by a team of one Project Manager, a Business Analyst, 1 web engineer, 2 Windows system/network engineers and a tester …

But heck, one of my colleges (the other Windows system/network engineer) and I just shrugged and said: “when do you want this done by?”

Quick side note The Windows engineer mentioned is a colleague and team mate at work. When I started, it was identified that him and I would be working together a fair bit. He is what I like to describe as a walking tech encyclopaedia … his knowledge is INSANE!!!

Anyway, him and I started off to an interesting start. I believe he was unsure of my tech abilities, and isn’t exactly a “glass is half full” kinda guy. Things were rocky there for some time. To the point that at times I had to chat to my line manager about certain incidents.

But, it seems that over the last 7 - 8 months, things have changed. It was almost a sudden change. He started treating me with a fair amount of respect, and also started requesting my time to discuss things and get my opinion on different matters. Not only that, but he listens to my opinions and at times has agreed that mine made more sense and we go in that direction.

It has been quite the change and has made my already amazing job even better! :-D

Well, after 5 months gunning it with my colleagues and the putz of a PM, we delivered on what was required for the project.

Encryption is being rolled out with <1% noticeable impact to users and the Windows OS upgrade process (rather complicated but very successful) has been such a hit, and we have identified that the process has potentially saved thousands of dollars for the organisation. The central software distribution system has also made a good impact where was necessary and will be continued and developed into an amazingly powerful system.

Since the project has ended, things haven’t calmed down at all. Turns out we are losing a team member. The stuff he was working on has been picked up by two other team mates, but it has also meant that I have had start some solo flying on the Windows front. Seeing as it is the major OS used in the organisation with over 7 000 machine across the country … it’s a big job.

But despite the busyness, I have solved some intriguing issues that haven’t been touched in quite some time due to the complexity of the tasks involved. I have also revised and cleaned up quite a few of the systems that we use which will make for less busy later on.

But … this brings me to this last week; specifically the last day of said week. I was going through and updating the base applications used by all the Windows systems and came across a doozy of an issue. While I was on the project, we had another employee come into the team to kinda back fill [some] of what I do on a day to day basis. He updated one of these applications, Path Copy Copy, which had gone from quite an old version (3.0) to a much more recent one (10.1).

Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue; but with this new version came a completely new configuration which my colleague obviously missed (don’t know how … but oh well). This configuration is not only completely different to previous versions, but had some great new things to setup to make the experience even better!

With the old version, only very few options were available; and even less could be customised. What could be customised had to be done in the Windows registry and had to be done at the user level. With the new version, not only has the default settings location completely changed (and the documentation a wee bit out of date <rage />), but you could do a lot more to customise it. The new location for the default settings was now at the machine level (so much better!) and also had a lot of new features added. But with these new features came new defaults and these defaults conflicted with the old settings that the other employee had not even payed attention to. So not only was the program config kinda broken, the documentation around fixing it was out of date too. I did end up getting all the configs sorted and also created a new plugin for the application which will provide a great new feature to a decent and useful program.

But after an amazing week developing a new feature into the image release process (which really is quite awesome *shines vanity badge*) it was such a shit to have to spend a good few hours getting this muck up fixed.

Alas, the problem is fixed and life can move on :-P

Well; there we go. It has been some time since my last post, and it felt great! Sorry for such a long and possibly boring post, but meh. It’s my site, so

To all who were kind enough to get to this point, take care and thanks! :-D