The Software Demo Demon
Feb. 13th, 2007 09:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnToday, I am the backup plan. The user acceptance test for the system that we've been working on is going on in another part of the city, so we have two people down there, another working from home to fix things if they go wrong, and I'm here to turn something off or turn something on or something like that in case anything needs adjusting on the demo server.
The Software Demo Demon that we were all taught about in Software Engineering took great vengeance upon the company last night, as the demo server began locking up at random and the workflow system that had been working fine for the weeks beforehand slowed down to a crawl because of some sort of jammed SQL query. Fuelled by some or more of beer, Diet Pepsi and pizza, we sat in the conference room with the two main developers tweaking bits of it then uploading, and the founder and I testing each possibility out.
I left at about 9:30 in the end because I needed a hope of getting up at 6:30 to prepare for my rush-hour trip into work. Normally I work from about 10:30 to 18:30, but the people at the company we're selling the system to have different ideas about the sensible time to get up on weekdays, so this time, after a night continually waking up from nightmares about balloting and SQL, I had to join the packed train that spent most of its hour-long journey time stuck in dark tunnels without moving. I'd rather not do that too often.
But on arriving here, I found out that the others had eventually got the system working and gone home at 4:30am. You have to admire anyone dedicated enough to do that. And when I get more experience in writing the thing, that's what I've got to look forward to!
The Software Demo Demon that we were all taught about in Software Engineering took great vengeance upon the company last night, as the demo server began locking up at random and the workflow system that had been working fine for the weeks beforehand slowed down to a crawl because of some sort of jammed SQL query. Fuelled by some or more of beer, Diet Pepsi and pizza, we sat in the conference room with the two main developers tweaking bits of it then uploading, and the founder and I testing each possibility out.
I left at about 9:30 in the end because I needed a hope of getting up at 6:30 to prepare for my rush-hour trip into work. Normally I work from about 10:30 to 18:30, but the people at the company we're selling the system to have different ideas about the sensible time to get up on weekdays, so this time, after a night continually waking up from nightmares about balloting and SQL, I had to join the packed train that spent most of its hour-long journey time stuck in dark tunnels without moving. I'd rather not do that too often.
But on arriving here, I found out that the others had eventually got the system working and gone home at 4:30am. You have to admire anyone dedicated enough to do that. And when I get more experience in writing the thing, that's what I've got to look forward to!
