No specific topic currently, just a few points.
I now get paid out a lot of my overtime hours and keep record of the new ones quite strictly. It seems that my department leader is a bit surprised now how many people do overtime hours for the various reasons.
It's strange, you should avoid overtime hours, but get your work done for specific dates.
Yesterday the machine cluster where TaskZilla (and other of our internal tools, as i.e. TWiki) sits on suddenly disappeared.
Later I found out that one of the Sysadmins wanted to do something with the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) of the cluster and suddenly the cluster stopped making noise ;)
There was some trouble during re-startup of TaskZilla like missing mountpoints, wrong database-links, wrong webserver config, etc., but after about 1 1/2 hours, everything was up again. Luckily the database files seem to be unharmed.
Just a simple switch has died in the electronic shock, so TaskZilla is not reachable from some networks anymore, should be fixed by noon today.
Today will be a meeting with some project managers and development managers. The meeting has been called in because a customer wants an upgrade of its current system to support a new technology. The problem is that we can't (well, we can, but it's too risky in everyones eye) replace the whole system with the new one but we have to integrate the new one into the old one.
Of course there are many small things to do and we already guessed their duration but aparently the overall duration is too long for the project managers and today in the meeting there will be a discussion how to lower the development time or invent another solution which takes less time.
But I don't think that the time can be lowered that much. There is work which has to be done and we already told how long it would take. We can't do it faster just because the cost is too high for the project manager. Either we take the time for that or it won't be done in an acceptable way. In the first case the cost is too high in the last the customer will have much trouble and we will need more time again to fix these troubles.
Of course I personally want to make it right, because on the long run it gives the customer a better quality software with less trouble but somewhat higher cost. And then he hasn't to pay afterwards for upcoming bugfixes and repairs.
Dammit, there is no clear solution which would satisfy the project manager AND the developers.
And (of course) the initial development should be finished in a month and without overtime hours ;)
I personally want to hold the deadline in a month to give the customer a great experience but that would need an almost uninterrupted dedication from our side which is more than improbable. And it would be too expensive for the project manager ;)