Most of my time at my new job is supposed to be "billable". This means things like touching up documentation or refactoring code for better maintainability have to be squeezed into other projects. Since this is my first week, however, I'm not expected to have any billable time. So I'm touching up documentation.
This is really nice- it makes it easy to feel like I accomplished something. That's hard to do in the first few days at a new job. I actually have a useful realistic task to perform. I've got a few others- like being the guinea pig for Visual Studio 2005. Now, I've used it before (unlike most of my co-workers), but I've never really used it with applications like this ancient classic ASP app. Theoretically, it might become a DotNet app someday, but this goes back to billable time- that's not going to add features or functionality, therefore it doesn't matter.
It's going to be a very different experience for me, but the app I'm babysitting is definitely an interesting challenge. It's a contract-management/facility-operations-m
//It doesn't help that every time someone finds out what app I'm going to be working on they frown or apologize.
This is really nice- it makes it easy to feel like I accomplished something. That's hard to do in the first few days at a new job. I actually have a useful realistic task to perform. I've got a few others- like being the guinea pig for Visual Studio 2005. Now, I've used it before (unlike most of my co-workers), but I've never really used it with applications like this ancient classic ASP app. Theoretically, it might become a DotNet app someday, but this goes back to billable time- that's not going to add features or functionality, therefore it doesn't matter.
It's going to be a very different experience for me, but the app I'm babysitting is definitely an interesting challenge. It's a contract-management/facility-operations-m
//It doesn't help that every time someone finds out what app I'm going to be working on they frown or apologize.
Keeping the docs up-to-date is definitely covered, but replacing missing documentation seems to be a low priority.
This app is basically the "Break in the Newbie" app. Nobody likes maintaining it, but it touches on every area of the business. Thus making it good newbie food to learn on.
I had fantasies of getting some leeway to refactor stuff for maintainability, but... no. On new development, sure, but not here.
There's no reason- no reason at all- to store as much information about individual screens in the database. New screens are rarely added, and it would be easier to just use HTML templates, instead of storing all that crap in the DB. The query templates do make a little sense- users have a pretty powerful query tool they can use as a result, but the same thing could have been accomplished with ad-hoc queries and some smart stored procedures.