3 for 3, baby!
As in, my two data patches and code patch all received business approval to get tossed into production today. My weekend was spent watching our handwritten replication process chugg along after fixing a pretty large dataset that managed to fall between the cracks of our sync procedures.
Today is going to be spent fixing datasets that were never generated properly due to a variety of causes, mostly the past developers not finishing their work. I've learned that creating a button that says one thing while having nothing in the application that does anything remotely to the description will cause the client to believe that the functionality existed at some point. Of course no body can honestly remember if that feature was promised, or how it was even supposed to work; but its a priority bug now so it needs to do something.
My side project is coming along well. I've recently rekindled an interest in my city's crime statistics and came the realization that our interactive crime map left some things to be desired. Specifically heat maps, graphs (actually any historical data past a few months; it seems to only show recent datasets) and intelligible search functionality. I've written a Excel loader and dump all of the city of Houston's crime data into a SQL database. I plan on having a really simple web application to show the results correlated on a google map using gmaps.js.
The loading process was a pain. Some workbook's schema was completely different so I had to tweak my loading sproc and engine for a handful of datasets and revert back. I found solace in the fact I could curse the name of the person who created the excel file due to the metadata.
So Hubski, what are you working on today?
I'm taking full ownership of some research data, and today I'm creating a new, less disorganized schema (Excel file lol) for tracking patient enrollment, testing, results, followups and data entry. The system we are using now is a patchwork creature that Mary Shelley would recoil from in terror. It started as a template created by some Ivy-leaguers who would never actually participate in the project I'm working on, and quickly ballooned as research coordinators (Like myself) found that they needed to keep track of more and more things, which has resulted in a document that is really really time consuming to use, and never looks good.
Unless of course someone up in clinic decides they want to participate, in which case that whole plan get's thrown out the window.