As the primary developer for a software package used by a growing number of schools, my work load has grown exponentially over the past few years.  By primary developer, I of course mean the only developer.  I also do customer support, general IT, database administration, and pretty much any other role that needs to be filled.  The trials of working for a tiny software company.  There is only one other person who is involved with the school software and that would be the marketing/customer point-of-contact person.

This morning, we were reviewing some voicemails from customers and received a “funny” call from a parent she had been speaking with about a problem with one of the schools.  This particular parent had encountered a weird browser error message that I’m working on resolving.  The parent left the message to thank us for our help and not to worry, she had some sort of issue with every other online system from each school she’d applied to.  Then she proceeded to list off all of the schools she had issues with.  This was actually quite informative… we lost our first client recently and one of the schools she mentioned having issues with was that schools “replacement” software.  Good for us.  However, the next school she mentioned was another school we wrote the software for… whoops!

Had a technical issue today that had never cropped up before. I had been presenting a list of files with their last “change” time. After an infrastructure change, all the files had been moved and the change time now reflected yesterday. However, the “modification” time still had the correct date. A quick modification to use modification time instead of change time resolved the situation but how many regular, everyday users would understand the difference between the two?

Christina wanted a more reliable car for her errands today so I took her car this morning and left her mine.  Unfortunately, I forgot to get my office key off the keychain.  Couple that with my coworker staying home to take care of her kids as school opened late today, I got a nice 3 hour "break" in the hallway outside my office this morning.  Oi.