So far so good.

I'm sure the day can go downhill, but I'm hoping it won't. I've met the new project manager for our third (and biggest) project of the year, and she seems fairly together, albeit she's new to the company (one month) and not yet familiar with the product (she has the documentation but was only assigned to it yesterday, so...).

Thus far, today is pretty good. I have gotten code written; the people working for me seem to have ahold of stuff and have gotten code written; I forgot a conference call but the other attendees reminded me of it (informal conference: Laura, patch us through to each other - as neither of their phone systems will do that I was necessary for my phone as well as my knowledge). We got it done fairly quickly and managed to cover all the key points I knew about and a few I didn't, and the upshot seems to be that we have a good handle on what's going on. (This was reference general development but also the project mentioned above.)

I have a fax with the layout info we needed for the 5th or 6th project, which I need to go over with my boss. I haven't seen him yet and don't know when he'll be in (he was out of state yesterday, at our home office) but I know that he was planning to be in sometime today because he wanted to talk to me about a couple outstanding issues (one of which, at least, we seem to have sorted out the confusion on now and just need to resolve) when he was in.

I also learned that if salaried employees are sick on a day, but worked for any part of it, their sick time is not docked. I was not aware of that.... I suppose it will lead to my having more unused sick time at the end of the year, since much of my time out comes during the summer when my allergies spike up past my medicine's ability to control, generally sometime in mid to late afternoon. (Sick time vanishes into the mists at the end of the year, so there's no advantage at all to that, but hey. Live and learn, right?)

I also got a time-to-code estimate done on one of my designs. Broke it down into little tiny pieces, added them up, added contingency time, added testing and bugfix time, added a note on multiplier ratios for different employees. (It would take me 12 days. As the rest of my team is junior to me in varying degrees, budgeting them to do it for 12 days would be a bad idea....)

Hey. I feel competent today! Not special, not really really good (I haven't done anything miraculous yet), but competent.

And that's a nice feeling.

Aaaand....

Today mostly kept going well. Told this person what I needed, told that person what I needed, set this in motion, set that in motion. Coded. Called people about issues. Emailed.

I was on top of things all day. Never really ahead, but there. That was really cool.

At the end, a priority one bug. It was a real problem, with a real solution, though the initial description made it sound like a phantom problem (this client calls us all the time when they have trouble with a third-party thing they didn't get through us at all, and it sounded like another of that - but that was just that the description was lousy). Of course, it also wasted about 20 minutes of our time trying to look for clues as to where it was, but we eventually got it (within an hour) and all was good.

No clue what caused it. A process was frozen up; we killed it and let it restart and all was good. No idea how it got into that state. :( Or even how to find out. :(

But otherwise, it was good. And I have had vegetables and bread, and fruity snacks, and I am talking to friends online. All of this is muchly happy.