Ok, a time registration system. A bunch of Person objects in a database; projects you can book hours on; probably some assignment of persons to projects; a bit of reporting. Why build it yourself?!? There are 2538 existing ones! On the other hand, it is relatively simple, so it can’t hurt too much to build it yourself.
In the end, the assumption was that there are enough special cases to make it worthwhile.
In the end, I was the one making the new system almost single-handedly. Fun! I had a personal reason to particulary enjoy building it: it was a relatively straightforward Django app. Lots of Python coding, quite some thinkwork to set up the data model, designing the user interface. All things I like.
Now, why was this particularly enjoyable? Well, as I was quite stressed at the time. I recognized it and took a little bit of time off, spending some afternoons cycling. And, to quote from a previous blog post:
And at about the same time I started an all-new internal project: a relatively straightforward internal Django timekeeping app. Lots of work and lots of tweaking, but at least a stressless productive programming assignment. Just coming up with a good architecture, a good css layout, some nice and proper code and yeah, I was happy again.
So... “therapeutic programming”? :-)
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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