A number of readers have noticed that I've been a lot less visible lately,

both in writing articles and in answering posts. The reasons are a little off

topic, so if you're just looking for SQL stuff, stop here! If not, you might

find the rest of this mildly interesting.

I think most of you know that the three of us (Brian, Steve, and myself) do

it all here in addition to having full time jobs. And I think most of you know

that work schedules in the IT business are less than predictable. Combine the

two, the result is just short of chaos.

When we started up a little over three years ago we installed the Snitz

forums. Can't say we put a lot of thought into it, it was something Brian was

familiar with and we needed something, so we just loaded it. As we grew we

wrapped a lot of functionality around it - one example being that we create a

discussion topic for every article we load. Over time the performance started to

degrade, it had numerous security holes (it uses ALL dynamic sql, hurts me to

even say it) and upgrading was hard because we had tweaked the code in a lot of

places. Upgrading was going to be painful no matter what we did, so we decided

to bite the bullet and move to asp.net. We looked at options and went with

InstantForums. I spent every free hour

I had in December porting the forums over, customizing it, tuning the

performance. We got it done, but we're still chasing down a few bugs and a good

dozen feature requests. I won't say it was the smoothest transition, but overall

everyone was very supportive while we worked through the major issues.

In January things got a little busier. Tina Rourk, the CIO at my

day job was offered an opportunity to

become the CIO of our parent company. She

had been with the company 15 years, so her leaving definitely left a gap to

fill. After several months of searching, her replacement ended up being my long

time boss Sean

Burke. Somehow out of all of that I ended up taking the job Sean vacated,

managing the development team. I had been wearing two hats as DBA and developer

for a while, but it's still quite a change.

It's fun to have the opportunity to influence direction a little more and try

new things, but it's tough letting go of being in the thick of writing code and

solving problems. Really tough! Sometimes I just want to solve problems, not

work on schedules. If you're thinking of moving to management, spend some time

thinking about what is important to you before you move. Steve had been through

this just a few months earlier, was nice to have someone to call when going back

to writing code was looking very good!

Since January it's been a lot of work to get settled and try to get the team

acclimated to how I work - my methods tend to be a little unconventional (more

on that in a future article), plus master all the managerial trivia that goes

with this type of job. We're growing too. A year ago there were three developers

plus me, now there are seven developers, we're looking for one more senior

developer and a world class DBA (yes, email me if you're interested). I'm lucky

to have a team of people that are capable and willing to put up with me while I

learn. The team includes my old friend

Leon, Amy,

Chris, Tom, Kevin, Joe, and Vivek.

Somewhere about the second week of January all the little free time I had

disappeared. The luxury of taking a ten minute mid morning break to peruse posts

disappeared too. What can you do? The day job pays the bills and more

importantly, I like to win! That means putting in the time up front. Of course

just having all of that going on wasn't enough, my wife was pregnant at the same

time. On March 30 our first child Tabitha Grace was born. Now there just isn't

enough time in the day!

I suspect it will be another month or two before things settle down. Steve is

managing content for me for a while and will be trying to make up for my absence

in the forums. I'll be using what time I can find to resolve the open code

issues and work on getting some features added that we've wanted for a while -

stuff I can work on without a real deadline. Depending on your interest, I also

hope to share some of the problems and solutions as I learn more about managing

a development team. Let me know what you think.