June 5, 2007

Day 02: The Leash

I spent the morning interviewing more potential contractors. I find it astonishing how many people that contracting firms are trying to push out at over $70 an hour who can't do even the most basic tasks associated with their advertised platform (in this case, C#/ASP.NET). My prescreening questions are culled from the first 150 pages of "ASP.NET for Dummies." Really.

One guy told me, "I enable ViewState on my web services so that they won't crash." What the Hell?

Inbetween interviews, I refactored the pricing module for the new multicurrency system so that it would not only allow per-currency fixed pricing, but also allow staff to purchase on behalf of someone else without changing their own currency settings.

At lunchtime, I finally received my leash...er, my BlackBerry.

Spent most of the afternoon refactoring the cart code to match up better with the design for the workflow server, and did most of the pre-work for the new build that has to go up tomorrow evening.

4 comments:

Tom said...

Getting a gadget at lunch time is supposed to mean you spend all afternoon playing with said gadget. I thought everyone knew this!

aiusepsi said...

I do hear really scary stories about how a surprisingly large amount of "programmers" really do have no idea what they were doing.

The acid test in C was pointers, really. If you didn't understand pointers you were no good.

The worrying thing today is that most C# programmers are going to have no idea that most of the types they're using are pointers, but some aren't.

chrismo said...

OCD Alert: If you're adding functionality, you're no longer refactoring. The term appears to be eroding these days.

Michael Russell said...

chrismo:

The "on behalf of" functionality was there in the original system. I had it designed in the new system, but saw an opportunity to do it in a simpler fashion during this portion of the implementation, so I refactored the original stuff and then added in the "on behalf of" functionality in the newly refactored home for it. Thanks for catching the term misusage.