Having a couple of extremely busy and difficult weeks at work can leave you drained in the evening. The team at work has been tackling some big efforts by the business to bring fresh business goals to the system and improve those business things to give the company an edge in efficiency and the bottom line.

> It’s not a modernizing effort of the ERP.
> It’s not a slick new web service.
> It’s not a cool BI System with graphics, charts, and spreadsheets.
> It’s not the carrot at the end of the stick that seems to be all that shiny stuff posted as the “next thing” or the “in thing”.

It is business stuff to make improvements and upgrades to processes in the ERP that has programs thirty years old and is in multiple editions of RPG. We are digging deep and going all in to make the stakeholders see success and processes improve.

It’s not flashy, not full of cool code stuff, and it’s not fun. But it is what the business needs and that’s what we do. Bottom line, end of story, full stop.

Now don’t get me wrong. In my part of the project, I am writing clean, well-documented, and precise code that compliments the existing programs. I am working at the top of my game here and it does not matter that this code has stood the test of time and is a powerful tool for the business. The whole team is by the way.

I am all about digital transformation, modernism to eliminate technical debt, data precision, and writing code that will outlast me. But sometimes as a senior developer, we have to roll up our sleeves and do the real work of development in the trenches to achieve a business victory.

This is what I am bringing to the table this week. Next week, rewriting a communications and processing application for a streamlined core process using PASE, QSH, SQL, and lots of code and database services.