Being All Professional And Stuff
I spent some time updating my LinkedIn profile today. It's social networking for workaholics, but I suppose I have to admit that's what I am. When I think about what I'm going to do when I get a spare minute on the weekend, it's usually along the lines of experimenting with some technology -- which can then be applied to a problem I have at work. I love to tinker, to fiddle, and to poke, and the universe of things to play with is vast -- but my primary filter is whether I can use it at work the next week.
So I've spent some time with xlwt, which gives me a pure-python way to write out Excel-format spreadsheets. This is great stuff -- I've got a report right now which spits out CSV format, and when the users pop it open in Excel the default filter misinterprets some of the data, losing precision. This will let me give it to them in the proper format without the issue.
My other new favorite Python module is suds, which is a pure-python implementation of a SOAP library for web service clients. Point it at a WSDL, and you end up with a runtime-generated client for that web service, with a factory for WSDL-defined types and a simple, RPC-like API for the web service. I've been using it to pull down data from a SharePoint Web Service...that plus xlwt and I have a way to arbitrarily mashup Sharepoint data into nicely-formatted Excel sheets. If all works well, I should be able to generate my project management reports automatically, saving me hours of copy-paste-format operations in Excel.
Why do we use Excel for this crap? Well, as I've discovered, it's the one tool that's almost universally installed in finance companies. MS Project is second, but it's highly distrusted (and rightly so -- given the pace of our requirement/plan changes, I'd spend more time refactoring my project due to adjustments than I would actually doing the tasks on teh list!). Open source software? Forget it -- my manager teased me openly for trying to do these things in TaskJuggler ( though, I still think that package could work with a little data-gathering infrastructure ).
What I really want is project-management software that actually allows me to manage the project based on triggered inputs -- i.e. if each step of a project can automatically 'poke' an event into the system, and the system adjusts the final status/tasklist/etc. based on the events, then I can get a clear management report which allows me to think in terms of what things I need to change which then gives more events, which trickle back in to show me the result of the decisions.
Since it'd be event-based, it could keep complete revision history on events as well -- pointing back to the particular event which triggered the change in the plan/deliverable date/result/expectations.
That'd be sweet.
But I'm rambling.
Tweetaholic
- Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you. Today? I'm bear food.
- @hinsoncl @diaphanein Slack, yes. Utter disregard for the written English language, no.
- @alotofnothing I'm kind of like a fungus. I grow on people.
- My Pet Peeve: Business emails that disregard punctuation. How does one say, "That makes you look like a tool" in a proper business manner?
- @alotofnothing seconded. RATM sez: "Fuck you I won't tweet like you tell me!"
The Dwinkosphere
Oldest + Youngest, Best Buds
Ben & Amelia, proving that a 7-year age gap is nothing when it comes to brothers & sisters & Playmobil..
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New York, New York
The last time I went to NYC, it was for a conference. I brought along
Becky and Ben, and they went off to visit friends while I went to listen
to people talk about some Compliance thing or another. I don’t remember
much of the conference, to be honest, but I DO remember ditching it one
afternoon to walk around Central Park, Ben happily chasing his “Pumball”
(a wadded up piece of paper — yeah, he’s always been this way). It feels like a lifetime ago. Now, we have too many kids to bring them along, so it’s just me. I’m
going to work, and it’s cold outside. Probably will be so busy that I
won’t even make it over to Central Park, much less to wander around it.
Will be wearing dress clothes, and sitting in meetings, and maybe
getting some of the locals to show me something interesting after work. I’m thrilled to be going again, though. There’s something about NYC that
feels really good to me; maybe it’s that it is unabashedly City, that
it’s such a hodgepodge of buildings and nooks and crannies and people.
Or maybe it’s the streets and bridges whose names are famous nationwide, thanks to
Sex and the City and countless other movies and shows: FDR Drive, Park
Avenue, the Jersey Turnpike, Brooklyn Bridge — as a visitor, there’s
great novelty in seeing that you’re riding on these streets that have
been mentioned a million times. I imagine it’s the same feeling Chicago
visitors get about Michigan Ave or Lake Shore Drive. So, this time I intend to breathe in as much as I can while rushing from
airport to office to hotel and back to office again, embedding another
fond memory into my cortex to tide me over until the next time I get to
visit, because while Chicago is my home, I will always love New York.Posted via email from dwink | Comment »
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