Mindy's Programming Journey

For almost 30 years, I have been a primarily behind-the-scenes programmer. Graphic design is not my forte. But when you work in a small company, you are required to become a jack-of-all-trades.  So I find myself finally forced to figure out how to make "pretty" Facebook posts.  Let's see how this goes.  My Google search has turned up OpenGraph tags.  Off I go from the Compose page in my blogging app to the HTML page so I can add the necessary tags.  But first a pretty picture...

This is a side note to a bigger article I want to write but some background is needed first. In 2008, I was introduced to a new client with a huge project.  The project specifications were extremely detailed.  The IT director who created the specifications seemed very heavy handed and almost scary.  Side note:  I never met the man in person, I communicated with him via email and telephone. He passed away in the fall of 2016.  I did see a picture of him once.  Not at all what I expected. By some miracle and my refusal to fail, the project was completed on time.  And was the first of many projects to be completed for this client.  Even after his passing, we continued to work on projects for the company as I had amassed quite a bit of subject knowledge that I needed to pass back to the newer employees of the department. Why does this matter?  Herman was that IT director and even though I had almost 20 years of programming experience, I lea...

It's been almost 6 months since I first posted in this blog.  And the refactoring is still far from being complete.  As is common with a small team working on a project, emergency (perceived and real) improvements have been made to the product.  Holidays, end of year and start of a new fundraising season events interrupted progress on refactoring including the most important task of adding indexes to some files to (hopefully) drastically improve speed on the larger data requests. I work from home so the last weeks of suggested (and now required) shelter in place due to COVID-19 concerns have not impeded my ability to make progress.  In fact, it's actually improved since I no longer take a 2-3 hour lunch to work at a local Catholic grade school as the lunchroom cashier.  My own children (ages 20, 16 and 16) are home but largely self-sufficient.  Now that I have been able to return my focus to refactoring, I picked up where I left off thanks to my work log ...