Code Ahoy…
I’ve had what I like to call a good coding day. Coding, when done right, is a lot like writing or any other art. Nuch like writer’s block, sometimes there are days where you just can’t seem to code even the simplest of if..else statements. And then there are days wheb you’re golden, and the most complex of algorithms bend to your indomitable will and fearsome skill.
It’s a rush, really. On one of those days, you’re sitting at your keyboard, fingers flying over the keys, something hard and alive playing on your speakers, hacking an unruly while loop into submission, giving your app the capability to do things far beyond what the end user will ever even approach… hell yeah.
Today I finally got to work on a subsytem of the online shopping system my company’s assigned to me. The system itself is little more than a dirty hack itself, something our lead coder whipped up in a couple of days for the specific needs of one of our clients. It worked, of course, did its job. Problem is, our sales guy saw it working and decided that he should sell the system to other clients. By then, of course, our lead programmer had moved to another project, so the task of turning this highly specific, not quite ready for prime time hack ino a usable shopping cart system fell to me. It hasn’t exactly been a cakewalk, I’ve had to recode entire sections from scratch due to the fact that they were too specific to that one client and they needed to be able to adapt to a wide range of clients and products. However, it’s been working, and we’re allready running a large chunk of the code live.
Today I’d scheduled in one of the more critical subsystems for recoding: the order handling system. Right now when you place an order, the shopping cart would email the details of the order to the store manager, and then delete the order. What if the email gets lost or bounced? Real shame, that. Your order’s lost. What if I wanna check what my order was? Or wether it’s been shipped yet? Better hope the store manager kept a copy of the email. This situation, of course, was clearly not acceptable.
So here’s what I’m doing: I’m giving the system the ability to store your shopping cart indefinetly, including the status, so the client can check it from anywhere, or pause it and continue it later from anither computer. The store manager can now check what orders there are and what their status is from pretty much any web-connected puter. And it opens the door for other possibilites like multiple shopping carts per client, the ability to store a specific cart for use in regular scheduled deliveries, cool stuff like that. I figured the back end of this system recode would take me at least 3-4 days to complete. However, I was in the Zone today. I was the Ghost in the Machine.
I finished the entire backend recode today. Including having it checked for bugs by the other guys. Clean, well-commented code, restructured several tables in the database, put it up on the testing service and had the bugcheck done all by 5. I r0xx0rz. @.@!
Of course, this just means I have more time tomorrow to spend with the cows over at Supreme Beef. Blah. At least the excellent food should keep the trip to Salinas tomorrow from being a total waste of time.
