Back to work. I managed to read for half an hour and then slept for close to half an hour at lunch, which is about average for me. That mid-day nap makes a big difference in my energy level for the rest of the day. I’ve been doing it for years and years now, and I am able to fall into a pretty deep sleep almost instantly. I would highly recommend it to anyone who has the ability to do it.
While reading Lunar Prospector, I read how they divided up the technical documentation of their proposal and I thought that, with some modifications, that same organization would work for the technical documentation for a software project. (The modifications accounting for the fact that we don’t have to fly our software through space.) I jotted down a note on my small whiteboard to remind myself to investigate organizing the Conference Services Project documentation this way.
When I checked email at 1 PM, I found a message asking if it was okay to cancel our weekly project meeting tomorrow for the Projects database. There is a gap of a few weeks while the sponsor of the project is out of the country and we can’t roll the prototype into a working production environment until he is back, so the delay makes sense. It also means I gain a usable hour tomorrow! I replied that I was fine with that, but that we should get some confirmation on the budget we submitted, as it was not non-trivial (close to $40K, through the end of December, most of which was for my time and several days of a tester).
I point out these last two items as examples of how things like email messages and ideas I get from my reading can impact a typical day and ultimately, my week. The idea for organizing technical documentation will add to the work I have to do on the CSP, but will ultimately result in better technical documentation. The cancelling of the weekly Projects DB meeting tomorrow gets me an hour of time back, which is always good when I am as busy as I have been.
Finally, I have to send my boss (who is out this week) an email message suggesting that one of the new developer positions for which we are hiring be located here in the Washington office. There are some space constraints in the Santa Monica office and it might be a good idea to have another team member out here (there are no such constraints here). I know his concern will be that the person will be unsupervised but that is not true. I can both supervise and mentor the new hire if they work out of this office. I need to get that message written and sent off sometime this week.
But for now, back to the real work…
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