One of Those Days

Today at work was just one of those days where I wonder how anything ever gets done there.

I have been working on a small project of documenting several processes that our group performs.  The one I started yesterday involved going to a vendor website, downloading some updated files, unzipping the files and repackaging the files that are needed by our system. We then move these smaller file packages to various servers depending on the package type.  Because of how we do our development work, this mean putting the files out in four different environments.  Development, IT Testing (we test how good our development is), UAT (where we let our users do testing) and production. I figured this would take me a day to perform the action and write up the processes.

That came to a screeching halt.  Because this is a fairly new process that was implemented about eight months ago there have only been two updates to this area.

It turns out that each of our four environments are set up differently.  Not good.  They should all be the same.  How else can you expect something that you developed to work properly if, as you migrate it up the chain to production, everything is different? You can't.

So at 2:30 this afternoon, I pull together two of the people who worked on this previously.  No one knew why everything was different.  The guy who did most of this work went to another area shortly after this was implemented.

Now it is my mess to clean up.  We have to get each of the environments look identical.  That means trying to figure out what they did in production and working backward to replicate it.  This means making server changes, database changes code changes and who knows what other changes.

This may now consume the rest of the month if not longer for me.  I don't mind it, as I am learning lots of new stuff but I hate going back and cleaning up other people's messes that they were too lazy or incompetent to do right the first time.

It also meant that I didn't get out of work until almost five and hit some crappy traffic on the way home.  It took me an hour to get home and I had to walk the dogs in the dark.  That made no one happy.