A Project and a Professional Renaissance

A few months back I was extremely involved in a major development project; this project was an effort that distributed nearly $250k between different contractors for different services. Our job was to actually develop the application. This was an ASP.Net project that had been started by another shop several years earlier. We were to implement several hundred pages of improvements and while we were at it, we were directed to bring it up to par with the current industry technologies.

This project which I will code name Pegasus (partly because I like the neat code names from MS and partly because of where I work) was written in .Net 1.1, using stored procedures, and an immensely cryptic Data Access Layer (DAL). It was by no means complete. In fact there was very little that was done by any since of the word. I would call it a prototype, but really it was more of a proof of concept. Still there was a large code base, which we were charged with adapting vs. replacing.

My role was twofold; first I was to serve as team lead, sitting between the “executive branch” where decisions were being made about requirements and deadlines and the “programming arm” where the actual construction was taking place. My other role was an obvious and familiar one, software engineer.

I thought I’d take a little time and document what I learned throughout this long project and comment on where I find myself after its completion, so am going to write a multi part series documenting the goings on (not necessarily chronologically) over the last year or so.

Stay tuned, next time I will discuss staffing complications that arose over the lifetime of the project (at length).