Project timescale estimates
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- but only in the most trivial sense ... So, having thought myself "cured" and decided I had written my last program, I found myself with boring and non-urgent jobs to do today. And the thought struck me of a trivial weekly task I have that does take 5-10 minutes and needs my brain to be semi-working. This involves some very trivial arithmetic and some date/time calculations. I decided a simple Winforms app and an absolute max of 1 hour to start, finish, publish and forget. Combine rustiness with, surprise, surprise, an eternity playing around with foreground and background colours, font sizes, layouts etc (I do hate boring grey forms!) - 2.5 hours later ... :sigh: Until tomorrow when I use it in anger and decide all the above needs changing, probably for no good reason. That was definitely my last program. Honest.
Yeah, what you really need is an Excel spreadsheet to stoke the fire. If I read you right, you're getting into developing something then realizing that VS can't cope with the desired interface. That's certainly what always blocked the road ahead for me when I had an idea I wanted to put down then suddenly broke my own nose on the side of MS's head ... because I forgot to put a helmet on. Excel: Formula cells that resemble hard-coded For/If/EndIf statements. With ease ... then suddenly you've got a windows form with roots of equations displayed. Ah, 64-bit VS! Eleven years in the making ... icons in six million colors at last!:cool:
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I have the opposite problem -- if I think something is going to take, say, 2 hours, it takes 2 hours. I've discovered that if I set an arbitrary but reasonable time, I can almost always meet that time. If I over-estimate, well, I end up using all that time whether I needed to or not. Bizarre how that works. Particularly in finding a bug. It seems if I give myself too much time, my brain slows down.
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DivWindow: Size, drag, minimize, and maximize floating windows with layout persistenceYou are a better man than me. I sincerely wish I had that problem.
My brain is slow already
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I doubt it. Programming is like heroin, or pop corn, once you start you will never stop. As to time scale estimates, it always takes longer than your most pessimistic estimate. Project creep is my biggest enemy.
No plan survives the battle.
Slow Eddie wrote:
Programming is like heroin
Nope, I retired and I have deployed 1 small app in 2 years, rarely open vs and then only to apply updates (I have no idea why). Oh and I dislike popcorn too.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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I doubt it. Programming is like heroin, or pop corn, once you start you will never stop. As to time scale estimates, it always takes longer than your most pessimistic estimate. Project creep is my biggest enemy.
No plan survives the battle.
Slow Eddie wrote:
Programming is like heroin
Decades ago I quit programming because it was lo longer a challenge to me. I moved into the world of networking and eventually became the IT manager of a medium sized company. 3 years ago a need arose where some coding was required. Nothing big. It couldn't hurt, could it? I am now coding full time.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
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I have the opposite problem -- if I think something is going to take, say, 2 hours, it takes 2 hours. I've discovered that if I set an arbitrary but reasonable time, I can almost always meet that time. If I over-estimate, well, I end up using all that time whether I needed to or not. Bizarre how that works. Particularly in finding a bug. It seems if I give myself too much time, my brain slows down.
Latest Articles:
DivWindow: Size, drag, minimize, and maximize floating windows with layout persistenceI recently came across an article that I think describes this: Parkinson's Law is the old adage that work expands to fill the time allotted. Put simply, the amount of work required adjusts to the time available for its completion. The term was first coined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in a humorous essay he wrote for the Economist in 1955.
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- but only in the most trivial sense ... So, having thought myself "cured" and decided I had written my last program, I found myself with boring and non-urgent jobs to do today. And the thought struck me of a trivial weekly task I have that does take 5-10 minutes and needs my brain to be semi-working. This involves some very trivial arithmetic and some date/time calculations. I decided a simple Winforms app and an absolute max of 1 hour to start, finish, publish and forget. Combine rustiness with, surprise, surprise, an eternity playing around with foreground and background colours, font sizes, layouts etc (I do hate boring grey forms!) - 2.5 hours later ... :sigh: Until tomorrow when I use it in anger and decide all the above needs changing, probably for no good reason. That was definitely my last program. Honest.
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- but only in the most trivial sense ... So, having thought myself "cured" and decided I had written my last program, I found myself with boring and non-urgent jobs to do today. And the thought struck me of a trivial weekly task I have that does take 5-10 minutes and needs my brain to be semi-working. This involves some very trivial arithmetic and some date/time calculations. I decided a simple Winforms app and an absolute max of 1 hour to start, finish, publish and forget. Combine rustiness with, surprise, surprise, an eternity playing around with foreground and background colours, font sizes, layouts etc (I do hate boring grey forms!) - 2.5 hours later ... :sigh: Until tomorrow when I use it in anger and decide all the above needs changing, probably for no good reason. That was definitely my last program. Honest.
"that" task will take 10 minutes. what I can not currently estiamte for is - the 5 tasks I forgot that will need doing with it - the 3 user requests for design changes - the 4 additional must have requirements you forgot to tell me about - weather its ToString or toString so adds 20 seconds search and 2 hour rabbit hole reading some blog about why str is better then string and ""+"" should be done with a string builder. - then come deploy the half day figuring out who I need to contact for permissions to the production server because new policy changes so yeah, 10 minutes to get "that" one specific thing done.
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Slow Eddie wrote:
Programming is like heroin
Decades ago I quit programming because it was lo longer a challenge to me. I moved into the world of networking and eventually became the IT manager of a medium sized company. 3 years ago a need arose where some coding was required. Nothing big. It couldn't hurt, could it? I am now coding full time.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
This is my life. A tale of two worlds at continuous war. I started out in networking, admin and application support.. Opportunities arose to learn and contribute to the applications.. The development became a lucrative career path. 17+ years later I find myself looking for "the last program" and it always seems to be n+1. lol
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- but only in the most trivial sense ... So, having thought myself "cured" and decided I had written my last program, I found myself with boring and non-urgent jobs to do today. And the thought struck me of a trivial weekly task I have that does take 5-10 minutes and needs my brain to be semi-working. This involves some very trivial arithmetic and some date/time calculations. I decided a simple Winforms app and an absolute max of 1 hour to start, finish, publish and forget. Combine rustiness with, surprise, surprise, an eternity playing around with foreground and background colours, font sizes, layouts etc (I do hate boring grey forms!) - 2.5 hours later ... :sigh: Until tomorrow when I use it in anger and decide all the above needs changing, probably for no good reason. That was definitely my last program. Honest.
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- but only in the most trivial sense ... So, having thought myself "cured" and decided I had written my last program, I found myself with boring and non-urgent jobs to do today. And the thought struck me of a trivial weekly task I have that does take 5-10 minutes and needs my brain to be semi-working. This involves some very trivial arithmetic and some date/time calculations. I decided a simple Winforms app and an absolute max of 1 hour to start, finish, publish and forget. Combine rustiness with, surprise, surprise, an eternity playing around with foreground and background colours, font sizes, layouts etc (I do hate boring grey forms!) - 2.5 hours later ... :sigh: Until tomorrow when I use it in anger and decide all the above needs changing, probably for no good reason. That was definitely my last program. Honest.
I assume from the wording, you've retired. Congratulations, it's pretty great. If I may, some advice: have something to do. Go ahead and take a month or whatever to just relax, sleep in, etc. Retirement as in "doing nothing all day" sounds good in principle, but doesn't work in real life. So, after your relaxation period, make sure that you have some ideas of how to keep busy. It sure is nice not having to listen to a clock or deadlines or anything else. I'm bored with project X? Set it aside for a while, and do something else.
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I assume from the wording, you've retired. Congratulations, it's pretty great. If I may, some advice: have something to do. Go ahead and take a month or whatever to just relax, sleep in, etc. Retirement as in "doing nothing all day" sounds good in principle, but doesn't work in real life. So, after your relaxation period, make sure that you have some ideas of how to keep busy. It sure is nice not having to listen to a clock or deadlines or anything else. I'm bored with project X? Set it aside for a while, and do something else.
No, just working from home and it was a small app for work.
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- but only in the most trivial sense ... So, having thought myself "cured" and decided I had written my last program, I found myself with boring and non-urgent jobs to do today. And the thought struck me of a trivial weekly task I have that does take 5-10 minutes and needs my brain to be semi-working. This involves some very trivial arithmetic and some date/time calculations. I decided a simple Winforms app and an absolute max of 1 hour to start, finish, publish and forget. Combine rustiness with, surprise, surprise, an eternity playing around with foreground and background colours, font sizes, layouts etc (I do hate boring grey forms!) - 2.5 hours later ... :sigh: Until tomorrow when I use it in anger and decide all the above needs changing, probably for no good reason. That was definitely my last program. Honest.
I've written multiple applications (GUI, c/line, popup reminders, etc) to help me handle my numerous and varied personal projects and TODO lists. Now I've given up and just use Emacs org mode: If there's something out there that is better, I've yet to hear about it.
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This is my life. A tale of two worlds at continuous war. I started out in networking, admin and application support.. Opportunities arose to learn and contribute to the applications.. The development became a lucrative career path. 17+ years later I find myself looking for "the last program" and it always seems to be n+1. lol
This reminds me of one of my college professors. He had a proof about how every integer is interesting. Something like: "0 is interesting. Add it to any number, you get that number. Multiply by it, you get 0." "1 is interesting because..." "2 is interesting because...." "The first number you find that's not interesting -- well, not being interesting would make it very interesting!"