21st Birthday, More Projects!

Wow! I’m 21! I have a lot of updates to give, though of course I can’t give much detail. I went out to Dave & Busters with my friends and had a great time. All of my plants are doing good, and I have been able to start giving away strawberry plants, though I am being careful not to allow too many runners to grow from the one plant I am growing them from. This is important because it allows the plant to refocus its energy on strawberries and the runners I want to grow. Currently, I have gotten a decent strawberry yield and a large cucumber yield. The tomatoes are growing well, though they haven’t fruited yet, I suspect I will get some soon. Additionally, I will probably start making separate blog posts featuring my plants and what I am doing to document my experimentation and learning.

Acxiom

At Acxiom I have been granted the pleasure of being assigned to help on a few new, and old, projects that need to be completed. One is a migration project in which the original owner ended up with too much on his plate to be able to keep making progress in a timely manner. This is something that we are going through to get started back up with weekly meeting, and I only just received the permissions that I needed to actually get started on this yesterday.

Another project back onto my plate is the GitHub project. I will be working with the same team member to understand and implement the plan that he had approved with the architects. This was another thing that he had to set aside, however it is something of high priority. Therefore, I will be trying to get with him to discuss this exact issue soon.

One of the new projects that have been pushed onto my plate is an automation project for checking our creative emails that we get in from the client. Currently, we have to go through each email and check a spreadsheet to make sure everything is correct based on parameters in the subject line. This, however, takes up a lot of our time every week, so if I can find a way to automate this process then that will save hours upon hours of time each week. Clearly, the sooner I can start on this the better, but first I must do the research on how this can be done.

My final project that I am working on is a UI for tracking the various files that we receive on a schedule. We want to know if a file is late, when we next expect a file, and more all on one page rather than running a lot of SQL every time. Currently there is one person in a rotating team that keeps track of them and makes sure the files are arriving on time, but it is common for a missing file to go unnoticed. This UI on the internal website will allow the users to make updates to the table for notes, simple information changes, and more of each file. It will also allow the user to quickly see when a file is behind schedule. This is the project that I have put the most work into recently. I have gotten a working prototype that simply shows the file arrivals, but nothing fancy is happening yet.

What’s Coming Up?

• Continue working on a better landing page for this blog. (one day)
• Change “Projects” page to be a portfolio.
• Edit all the pages connected to the WIP landing page.

TL;DR

• I am 21
• I have many more projects on my plate
• I am making progress on the projects