Deadlines

Our Big Computer Project is going live tomorrow.  It's a private website, so I can't send anyone there...but for those customers it was intended for, it will be accepting real registrations and orders.  This is a pretty major accomplishment.

Looking back, in some ways I find it hard to believe we've only been working on it for only a couple of months: to put it in perspective, we began work on it right before our wedding (we were glad there was a break in the action long enough to give us a week off right after our wedding with only minor pangs of conscience).  We realized we were expecting Joshua right in the middle of a very busy week in which we were spending all day at the office and then visiting with Grandma every evening so we could learn how to do important things like transfer her from bed to chair and back.  The week we lost Joshua was probably the worst week Ben could've been tied up going to doctor's appointments and staying up all night at the hospital because there was a big deadline the next week that a lot of stuff needed to be finished for.

All in all, it appears to have been successful, though.  In a nutshell, the project was to build a customized shopping cart - inserting products in the database and all - for a very large company to send it's contractors to do purchasing for their construction projects.  Originally, Ben was supposed to find a coder who could do a lot of the programming work on the shopping cart since Ben had never built anything like it; but as time passed and deadlines loomed and there was no one applying for the position, Ben began learning the skills needed himself.  We discussed it a lot and realized that by the time Ben interviewed and found someone for the position, that person would then need to be brought up to speed on what was needed and integrated into the project.  In that same amount of time, Ben could learn and implement what needed to be done to build the cart himself - giving him a new skill that could then be turned around and used for other customers interested in a similar feature on their websites.  So rather than giving the work away to someone else nominally working under him, Ben took on the work himself.  I'm very proud of him, because every time a problem came up where the customer wanted some odd and unusual feature that Ben had never had any experience building before, he figured out what to do to take care of it and make the website work.

I'm also proud of him for displaying his usual calm spirit when other people were panicking and sometimes making unreasonable demands.  There was one conversation where if it'd been me instead of Ben involved, I would've been very tempted to tell the individual involved to go away and let people who knew what they were doing handle the situation.  To listen to Ben's response, you'd never know the other person was being unreasonable, foolish, and unnecessarily harsh.

When I'm actually in a conversation like that I'm much more diplomatic than when I'm on the sidelines listening to someone berate my husband for doing something much wiser than what the berator wants done.

At any rate, the next few weeks will probably be full of lots of little (and maybe not-so-little) fire-stamping activities, but the initial big part of the job is now successfully done.  Did I mention that I'm very proud of my wonderful husband?