Everyone knows that I have been and continue to be an active software developer. After I wrote my last blog post, my ex-boss at Wesleyan (John Meerts) reminded me of the first homegrown registration system that I helped write at Wesleyan in the mid 1990’s. This was a game changer at that point and it created the trust of the community in our abilities. This allowed me to both write and lead several other major programming initiatives there which I have carried with me to other institutions.

But, as a software developer in small institutions with small staff to work with, you always encounter issues. There is a lot of excitement around software development, but there is also a lot of risk involved. The community comes to rely on them and wants constant enhancements which can never be predicted ahead of time. Also, with constant changes to the web browser and underlying technologies, you need to continually monitor and apply fixes. As a result, we end up struggling to support these in the long run. Also, when we write our own, our capacity to thoroughly test them is limited and it leads to mistakes. I just wanted to highlight some such mistakes that I have committed myself or have seen it done by others. For the sake of anonymity, I am not going to say who committed which one and leave it to your imagination…

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On November 15th, I completed 9 years at the College. It has been an enjoyable ride and the time has gone by a little too fast. We have accomplished a lot and we could not have done it without the dedicated and hard working team that we have! The list of Annual Reports is a good list to look back at the progression and if you haven’t looked at the 2019 one, please do so here. One of the major effort for the past 3 1/2 years has been Workday and now that we have completed the initial phases of Human Resources, Financials and Student, we will be concentrating on the post production work, which seems like a very different mode than the period when we were implementing. There are still a lot of things to do, but the pace is different.

Talking about Workday Student, I wrote about our First Year registration earlier, but the real test was going to be the time when all four class years register. They did it in November and by all counts, it was successful. (more…)