Back in time

I find it quite interesting to have so much information about my past available on the web. I often use my own blog like a database that I can search for past solutions to problems, or for locating some text on my feelings on a subject that I can drop into a report and tweak. When producing code reviews for clients it’s useful to be able to justify your view points (I have a lot of views that need justification ;) ) and, in the interests of reuse, having those views up here means that I can easily reuse them.

I also find it interesting to look back in time occasionally and see what I was doing last year, etc… I did that today and I have 4 years worth of information…

8th October 2004 - I was working with a client on “the refactoring project”, a trade entry and FX rate display gui with “issues”. I was acting as a one day a week consultant to keep the main development team moving in the right direction. I had, previously, spent several months with them pointing them in the right direction… On this day we discovered that 11th October 2004 was Thanksgiving Day in Canada. We found that out because the team had stopped running the tests for the FX system and had introduced a bug…

8th October 2003 - I was working on a project of my own. An exercise in Test Driven Development to develop POP3 server and client code. On this day I harvested some code from a previous project so that I could easily build servers and clients that used OpenSSL to provide SSL protection on their socket connections. The OpenSSL code had been written for a client a year or so earlier and ended up as the basis for an article that I had published in Windows Developer Journal.

6th October 2001 - We were painting our flat. We bought a new apartment as a single, open, concrete shell and transformed it ourselves. The work took 18 months but then my dad did most of it and you can only push a 65 year old man so fast…

11th October 2000 - We were putting up the ceilings in the flat. Looking back it would have been nice to have a proper blog for the flat work rather than just a very simple series of pictures, but I didn’t know what a blog was back then. To be honest, if I had been doing proper blog posts for the flat I’d have had even less of a life than I did at the time. On the days that I wasn’t working at the flat I was working at an investment bank and visiting the site in the evenings to answer questions and make sure things were moving along. Most weekends were spent working on the flat and I spent a few months working full time on the project. Still, it was worth it when it was complete.

What were you doing on this day in previous years?