Worldcon Trip Day 38: Day Jobbe Calls
Aug. 30th, 2024 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeWe had initially considered taking a morning trip (non-rail-related), but something came up at the Day Jobbe.
Without going into too many details, there is a process that our team has to do every day that generates what amounts to our "work list" for that day. It draws material from our own company's systems and that of the customer who we support, manipulates it in certain ways, and creates the "work list." It sounds simple, but it's not, because the multiple systems don't connect all that well, so I wrote a system that does much of the work for us. Unfortunately, there's no way to automate downloading the data; you have to go into a certain form and enter the parameters, then download it. Worse, there's an upper limit on how much data you can download, so you have to split the download into pieces, run the query, then download the data. It can be very tedious. I wrote the program that manipulates the data and the documentation for the process. However, I long ago handed it over to other people on the team who normally do the work.
Unfortunately, both the primary and secondary people involved were off today. I'm the only one left who has ever done the work and of course, as the person who wrote the documentation, I should be able to do it. So I did of course say I'd be up early (relatively speaking) and get it done. Being in the UK, in theory I should get be able to have it done nice and early so that everyone else would have it when they started work.
I can't generate the data before about 0930 BST because the various systems around the world do not have it available until then. So I started at 0930 this morning and discovered that things that used to download now say they are too large. I had to by trial and error figure out how to break it into small enough pieces so I could download it. That took a lot of extra time to run the queries. Besides that, I was rusty, having not been the one doing the task for quite a while, so I made mistakes, even reading my own documentation.
Although it took a lot longer than I wanted, thanks to the time zones differences, I pretty much got everything done before most of the rest of our team started work in the USA (eastern and central time zones). At least nobody complained about it.
I'm happy that I have a three day weekend ahead of me. Monday is not a holiday in the UK, but that won't be stopping us from enjoying my long weekend.
Without going into too many details, there is a process that our team has to do every day that generates what amounts to our "work list" for that day. It draws material from our own company's systems and that of the customer who we support, manipulates it in certain ways, and creates the "work list." It sounds simple, but it's not, because the multiple systems don't connect all that well, so I wrote a system that does much of the work for us. Unfortunately, there's no way to automate downloading the data; you have to go into a certain form and enter the parameters, then download it. Worse, there's an upper limit on how much data you can download, so you have to split the download into pieces, run the query, then download the data. It can be very tedious. I wrote the program that manipulates the data and the documentation for the process. However, I long ago handed it over to other people on the team who normally do the work.
Unfortunately, both the primary and secondary people involved were off today. I'm the only one left who has ever done the work and of course, as the person who wrote the documentation, I should be able to do it. So I did of course say I'd be up early (relatively speaking) and get it done. Being in the UK, in theory I should get be able to have it done nice and early so that everyone else would have it when they started work.
I can't generate the data before about 0930 BST because the various systems around the world do not have it available until then. So I started at 0930 this morning and discovered that things that used to download now say they are too large. I had to by trial and error figure out how to break it into small enough pieces so I could download it. That took a lot of extra time to run the queries. Besides that, I was rusty, having not been the one doing the task for quite a while, so I made mistakes, even reading my own documentation.
Although it took a lot longer than I wanted, thanks to the time zones differences, I pretty much got everything done before most of the rest of our team started work in the USA (eastern and central time zones). At least nobody complained about it.
I'm happy that I have a three day weekend ahead of me. Monday is not a holiday in the UK, but that won't be stopping us from enjoying my long weekend.
