Oct 17-21

The first 2 days of the week were spent at MTSU at an IT conference covering mobile applications. We learned about the the development of the application, the background needed to set it up, the programming languages and more. We took notes and are looking into developing one of these applications in the future. 

Programming languages include Groovy, Ruby On Railes, Java, and Grails.

You write one program and then can compile it for many devices including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. 

I worked on bug fixes on Wednesday. 

I was out of the office Thursday and Friday. 

October 10-14

This week was a short week as I was in meeting most of the week.

The biggest thing I worked on was adding features to the event tracking automated emails. I added breakdowns of given criteria. For example, the email will now contain the total number of students, and the count of fr, so, jr, sr, and gr students. It's a quick way to for the users to see how different demographics are attending the game. I also worked more on customized reports.

Other than that, I mainly worked on support issues since much of the office was out.

October 3 -7

What a fun week!. This week focused on improvements. One of the first things I did this week was meet with several people to discuss event tracking. I needed to get some more information on what was wanted out of the reports. I met with 5 people from different departments to discuss what information should be sent via email to everyone that creates and scans and events and what other specific information that certain departments wanted. This information will be put into an Argos report and only be accessible by that specific departments. After the meeting, I had a good grasp on what additional information is needed and started to work on it.

I also worked on improving a couple of automated emails. I made some corrections to the 2 monthly emails that remind users to fill out their leave reports.

The last thing I worked on was phone directory. I made changes to how the directory worked internally, added departments to the directory, and added a drop down box to select those departments. It seems to work really well, but was a lot of work. Now, if you select a department from the drop down box, you see the department information first (if available) and then everyone in the department. I also worked on getting faculty and staff ORGS worked out. For example, I now show up as Office of Information Technology instead of Inf Tech. Everyone in the Office of Information Technology shows up like this now. It's a big improvement. All changes should go live on Monday.

Sept 26 -- 30

Another fun week!!!

This week was mainly a maintenance week yet again. One of the bigger things I worked on was improving the efficiency of the event tracking system. Reports were taking anywhere from 45 seconds to 10 minutes or more to pull up. This didn't matter too much when I created the system because emails were automatically being sent with a report attached to them...

The same doesn't hold true once people request to have their own reports with their own data. These reports are created on demand. This means that the user must wait to pull the actual report up. Waiting 10 minutes just isn't acceptable. I set out to fix it... I rewrote some queries, improved several functions that give us data and recreated the tables with indexes. It took me a while to do all this but the end result is amazing. One report that pulls around 1000 students' information originally took around 11 minutes. After rewriting and optimizing the exact same report takes 4 seconds.

That's a huge improvement.