Quick update
Just realized, that my last post was more than two weeks ago and I thought it'd be time for a quick update of how's life has been in the meantime.
On the weekend of the 6th and 7th Oct. we had quite a large maintenance task at a customer. We replaced the main database and business server, which was an IBM server running AIX 4.3 and Oracle 9i, with a brand new Linux server, RedHat EL 4 on a HP Proliant and Oracle 10g R2. This was an incredible task, needing monts of preparations and porting effords as the interfaces, applications and scripts from an old Unix platform are not usable 1:1 on a fairly modern Linux system. And there were several dozends of them running on that machine, many not even documented anywhere but nevertheless business-critical. All in all on that weekend I've been working for about 24 hours straight, but on Monday morning when business started again it took not too long before the customer called in enthusiastically and reported a tremendous increase of speed and all critical interfaces working flawlessly. YES! These moments are the essence of a developers life. Of course, there are some minor glitches at some interfaces, but none of them being time- or business-critical and have been resolved during the week.
The following week has been a bit of a fight of two projects both requiring more time from me than I can provide. The sum of my time is always 100% and when both projects wanted to allocate 80% of it, I passed this issue on to my managers. Now I'm back at 80/20 :)
And over all the weekends is the cover of the university. Studying has been quite enjoyable so far and my classmates are great. The e-learning nevertheless is a quite different experience in attending lectures than I expected because it is much harder to stay focussed when you're just staring at a VNC session of your tutor and listening to the explainations on the headset. But I think, once getting used to this it can be an efficient way of learning.