Back in the Game

I've got a call this morning (early morning, earlier than i'd love to) from my IT department senior. He was in Semarang at the moment installing Oracle Business Suite at our office branch in Semarang. He's calling asking me how fast am i in building a simple CRUD (Create Retrieve Update Delete, for you unfamiliar with IT) web-application. I had never been good in estimating projects, so i say, quite fast if i'm using PHP and MySQL. He said, can you make it before the day's end? I said, confidently, that i could. So, he sent me an email about the data which would become a base to the said application.

I clocked in earlier today, and checked my email right-away, and there you go, with a quick glance i counted three main tables, with another three identity tables used as constants, and so forth. However, i see my problems looming right from the beginning.

I fired my favorite text-editor and begin typing.

It was simple at first, i began to create a form, blank fields, a button, and some script to handle the queries. I was done in a half-hour for one CRUD cycle. But, as i was more comfortable with PHP (i've never done PHP coding for four years), and everything is starting to come back, AND i was adding another CRUD cycle to the application, i began to twiddle, and suddenly i was absorbed by the design and modularity. I started to separated each functions, and entities into its own classes (as much as you could doing an Object Oriented Programming approach with PHP, that is), and meanwhile, my manager asked for a minute brainstroming (which turns out takes about thirty minutes), one of my friend had bought fresh fruits (rujak) and somehow decided to bring the food at my table to which become a sudden attarction to my other office-mates, my Messenger buzzing with my senior asking about the progress AND proposing new requirements, i was delighted and surprised that i could come up with something like the image shown above this post before the day's end. Of course, the application was still buggy, but if the work order was done correctly, there won't be any misfire results.

I feel exhilarated. I missed the old feeling of having oppressed by deadlines, given a challenge to create something in a small time-frame, and to do something that i know i was better at (at least, better than having to sell a product, for an instance). Is it time for me to get back to school? Well..