So my second week back at OpenText (as part of my third co-op term through the University of Waterloo’s co-op program) has come to a tidy wrap. I have to say, I am really happy to be back after the past eight months of studies. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy what I study in school, but sometimes a nerd just has to sit down and code something, am I right?
Last time I was at OpenText I was working in the Information Technology Project Management Office as a Process Control Administrator (what a mouthful). That job consisted of mainly administrative tasks (which are not exactly my area of interest). Thankfully, Mark Kraatz (my supervisor and resident “I’ve probably been at OpenText longer than you, your friends, and your dogs put together”) gave me the task of designing a project portfolio automation system to essentially replace myself (hey, wait a minute…) and make everyone’s job easier (suck less, or more fun, depending on your outlook on life).
Basically, my task was to “Automate our project portfolio system. We have the technology. We have the capability to build OpenText’s first automated project portfolio. Potts will be that system. Better than it was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.” And awesomer, I presume, all without crashing the Intranet.
Well by the end of my last term, I almost did that. Actually, apart from “without crashing the Intranet” (which I accidentally and somewhat proudly did a couple times during development), my final program actually did everything it was supposed to. I lovingly named my application Potts (after Tony Stark’s personal assistant), a name that Mark grudgingly put up with until I left (curse his sudden but inevitable betrayal!).
Since then, my baby PPAS has been in use by all project managers and teams in IT at OpenText. In fact, I have been getting words of praise and invaluable feedback on the PPAS—mostly things like “With PPAS, I don’t need to do the same task three times to keep everything in sync!” and “You wrote PPAS?! It’s a pleasure to meet you! I’m Dave!”. I am certainly quite pleased with all the friendly and enthusiastic people at OpenText (which is partly why I chose to return to the company).
Now, all this praise and feedback is great, but I must note the excellent (and I mean truly exceptional) work put into PPAS by the previous co-op who worked on PPAS after I had left. In the Fall 2010 co-op work term, a co-op by the name of Yifei took on the task of optimizing and expanding my original PPAS 1.0 code, under the careful direction of Mark. Even though aesthetically there has not been many changes to PPAS since I left last April, there has been plenty of back-end tweaks, bug-fixes, and even complete overhauls of some sections to bring PPAS decisively out of 1.0 and into 2.0.
All this is thanks to the totally badass work put in by Yifei, and so the praise for PPAS is as much mine as it is his. If he were around this term, I would personally thank him for how great of a job he did cleaning up my code and streamlining my methodology. What used to take a few minutes to run, now takes seconds. Scale that my the thousands of PPAS reports being run daily, and you’ve got some seriously badass performance improvements and savings. I hope he takes this shout out as a heartfelt word of “OMGFTW” from me.
Anyway, that’s what’s new with me since I was last at OpenText. Stay tuned for more updates as this term unfolds. So, toodles until next time on “Carl: Average Guy Extraordinaire!”