Posts tagged python

Ubuntu launched the a hundred papercuts project a while a go encouraging developers to fix small annoyances in the OS. More companies/teams/groups should do this.

I’m currently working one day a week at Macquarie and I’m more or less working on papercuts, things that take 1 or 2 days to finish that aren’t critical but will save people a lot of time.

I quite enjoy it. The work is challenging, you get given different tasks each day. The work is fulfilling, you get well recognised by your efforts.

However, I’ve come to realise that unless it’s PERFECT, users will always complain about something. I had to implement a brand new screen today to enable a functionality that involved calling a stored procedure manually beforehand. This could take days and involve sending multiple emails around to get approval. So in a couple of hours I had drawn up a new screen, did some simple tests and polished it up with meaningful helper messages. I showed it to the client and he seemed pretty impressed about the turn-around. BUT. It was missing one particular functionality.

I guess it’s understandable, when you want to get something done it might as well be done perfect or you might as well not do it. Let’s just say due to the way pyodbc (the python library for connecting to DBs) works it does not support return codes from stored procedures. What. The. Fuck. Because of this the stored procedure returns the same value every single time. This means that when they’re running the stored proc manually the DB client throws the dummy, whereas pyodbc is all chillin’. But yes, there is a solution to the problem which is to return a result set by running another query. Argh!

Anyway, that’s my mini rant. I’ll have to fix that up next week.

Oh and my contract came in today. The remuneration is pretty handsome plus we get bonuses each year. Hurrah!