Jeff Billimek’s Journal

I never heard back from that company asking to use one of my “Chicago skyline photos”:/gallery/chicago_08-03-2002. I guess they didn’t want to pay for its use and found something else. Hopefully they didn’t use it anyway!

On Tuesday we had a last-minute 3pm all-hands meeting. Brent (our vice president) announced they hired a new director for our group as the position has been vacant for the past three months or so. They are bringing in an existing director from the EBS group. After the meeting I went to Brent’s office and spoke with him for a few minutes. I asked him about the possibility of all development being outsourced. He assured me that this was not the case, but they may indeed look at outsourcing certain non-business specific pieces. For a while now I’ve been apprehensive about all software development becoming commoditized and all of the work being shipped offshore. With that looming prospect, it sounds like a change of career is in order. Brent also alluded to the fact that I may be getting more challenges in the days ahead. That sounds like a really great prospect.

Fortunately there have been no more software builds this week so I’ve been able to concentrate on coding again fulltime. Because of that, it’s been a really great week so far. As a matter of fact, I wrote a lot of code Tuesday night after I got home. Wednesday night I went over my code line-by-line and think the code is pretty solid now. Today I tested and tweaked these changes and started some serious unit testing. So far, all of ‘my’ code is executing with no problems. I’m planning on spending all day tomorrow hammering out different unit-test scenarios to test as many pathways as possible.

James (the guy I went to “Dublin”:/jeff/archives/2003/02/06/atldub.php with) asked me if I wanted to go to St. Maarten (SXM) this weekend. Going out there the flights are pretty tight but coming back it’s wide open. So if we don’t make it on Saturday morning, it is no big deal. Casey also said that he wants to go too.

After work today around 5pm a few of us went to the same bar we’ve gone to before. We played pool and had some food and drinks. It was a smaller crowd than usual, only myself, Carole, Casey, James, Bob, and Jay.