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I've got a bit of a "not invented here syndrome" (other people's work often just doesn't cut it) and so I created my own time registration and invoicing software for use at my company.
Usual story, it started out as Excel, migrated to a database, then a simple .NET Core application born from hopes and dreams of which I've realized maybe a third.
So this application works really well for me and my coworkers, but it has some quirks and lots of stuff I don't use or haven't finished...
Decided to fix them, then decided to completely modernize it, then decided to cut the fluff, then decided to add features I was really missing...
And a business partner of mine has been nagging me to let him use it for years now so I'm making it multi-tenant (he's my best salesman, bringing in two of my best clients, and I don't even pay him, so I guess I owe him one).
Haven't had so much fun programming in years!
I've been programming instead of gaming, so that's really saying something! 
And then when all was good and well my girlfriend suddenly broke up with me this week (we weren't in a fight or anything, but she just lost her romantic feelings for me and thought of me more as a good friend) 
It's only been three days, and usually I wouldn't even have seen her in that time either, but I'm already missing her and somehow the house feels empty even though she was around only about half of the time.
Well, sh*t happens and I've been through breakups before so I'll probably survive this one as well.
At least I've found a sort of new purpose in my software and I'm not bored 
Oh yeah, and I've been losing weight (after gaining 10 kg in about a year time! ) and this morning I was "suddenly" 1.5 kg lighter (after watching my eating and hiking and biking for weeks, mind you)
I've already lost about 5 kg in as many weeks (really going for it)!
I guess with my girlfriend breaking up I've even lost 65 kg (quote Ross from Friends: "ah, humor based on my pain, ah, ha, ha") 
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We have lived a parallel life up to the point where your girlfriend left.
I found myself in a sole proprietor retail given quickbooks desktop and a laser printer with the un-spoken words of ok, get after it.
Oh, hell no and got to writing my own POS webapp to support daily life in the little shop.
It also grew the same way as yours, going multi-tenant along the way etc.
Best of blessing going forward bro. 
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Ron Anders wrote: Oh, hell no and got to writing my own POS webapp to support daily life in the little shop.
1,000%. If you're a small business, reinventing the wheel while getting started is lacking focus at beast and a waste of resources at worst.
Jeremy Falcon
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Sander Rossel wrote: I created my own time registration and invoicing software for use at my company
I learned Classic ASP over 23 years ago writing a little customer lookup utility. Over the years, it grew to handle other stuff like billing, customer portal, bug tracking/reporting, and customer contacts (remotes/issues/offline work, etc.) That's the nice thing about 'rolling your own'.
Sorry to hear about your breakup. ![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
BTW, did you ever get those Azure DNS issues worked out from last week?
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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kmoorevs wrote: BTW, did you ever get those Azure DNS issues worked out from last week?
Sort of, I had to ask the Azure problem to my customer because we don't have full access to their network and DNS, so they should be the ones to fix it.
The localhost issue was a weird one.
I attributed the problems to differences in different (local?) DNS servers and fixed it by adding the following to my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 sub1.localhost
127.0.0.1 sub2.localhost So it's fixed, but not the satisfying sort 
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Sander Rossel wrote: I've got a bit of a "not invented here syndrome" (other people's work often just doesn't cut it) and so I created my own time registration and invoicing software for use at my company.
You sure that's the best use of your time for a small business, man? QBO will handle both of these and just about any CPA can work with QBO exports. Remember, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you always should.
Sander Rossel wrote: I've been programming instead of gaming, so that's really saying something!
 Noice
Sander Rossel wrote: And then when all was good and well my girlfriend suddenly broke up with me this week (we weren't in a fight or anything, but she just lost her romantic feelings for me and thought of me more as a good friend)
Sorry to hear that buddy. Not sure if you wanna hear my thoughts on the matter or just need to let it out. So, I'll shut up and just say sorry to hear that.
Sander Rossel wrote: I guess with my girlfriend breaking up I've even lost 65 kg
Niiiice. I'm in a similar boat. Let myself get way out of shape. You're human. At least you're fixing it man.
Jeremy Falcon
modified yesterday.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: You sure that's the best use of your time for a small business, man?
I'm pretty sure it's not, but time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time 
I've looked at some alternatives, but they get pretty expensive once you want time registration and invoicing and have employees.
And I'm doing with the time I've got to spare, so mainly instead of gaming.
It's a bit of a "playground" for new tech and upgrades too, though.
So I'm updating some components and checking if they're not breaking anything so we can update them for customers with minimum risk when the time comes.
Don't worry, there's still plenty of stuff I'm not doing myself
Jeremy Falcon wrote: Not sure if you wanna hear my thoughts on the matter or just need to let it out. So, I'll shut up and just say sorry to hear that.
Not really, well enough equipped emotionally and rationally to deal with this.
Jeremy Falcon wrote: Niiiice. I'm in a similar boat. Let myself get way out of shape. You're human. At least you're fixing it man.
In fact, my girlfriend was a bit of the reason I gained so much in the first place.
She likes candy and bought it.
I like it too, so I never bought it, but when she bought it I just couldn't help myself (while she could, so more for me!) 
I've been pretty much stable for years until I met her 
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Sander Rossel wrote: I've looked at some alternatives, but they get pretty expensive once you want time registration and invoicing and have employees.
There's also OSS time tracking. Granted, I never used it so it may suck.
I can give you idea of how much QBO is though. I pay around $300 a year and $50 an employee per month for payroll. I don't do any hardcore time tracking, so I don't use that package. But, according to their site it's $10-$20 a month and $10 per user. So, to go all out for 5 employees it's about $4k USD a year, but the biggest chunk of that is payroll. If you don't need that module it gets cheaper.
Granted Intuit's customer service sucks when it comes to Payroll. So, maybe I should change.
Sander Rossel wrote: It's a bit of a "playground" for new tech and upgrades too, though.
If you find something that handles Payroll and is better/cheaper than QBO, let me know please.
Sander Rossel wrote: Don't worry, there's still plenty of stuff I'm not doing myself
Noice
Sander Rossel wrote: In fact, my girlfriend was a bit of the reason I gained so much in the first place.
Been there, done that. For me it was stress in a bad relationship that's been on and off over 5 years. I'm a stress eater. So....
Sander Rossel wrote: I like it too, so I never bought it, but when she bought it I just couldn't help myself (while she could, so more for me!)
Dunno why, but even when I'm on a health kick, there's just something about junk food already being inside the home. Like, you can resist it at the store no prob, but when it's home... you can hear it calling your name... eat me... eat me... it says.
Jeremy Falcon
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Sander Rossel wrote: time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time 
Sander Rossel wrote: It's a bit of a "playground" for new tech and upgrades too, though.
Bingo, got it in 1, imo.
I too started invoicing with excel and grew to hate it, so similarly rolled my own in html. Then I got the hump with the pdfs the virtual printer was producing so rolled-up my sleeves and wrote a pdf creation library. In javascript.
I'm in the middle of dealing with becoming frustrated at having to choose from one of the 14 inbuilt fonts. I've got a browser window open with more documents that say Apple on them than is reasonable and I've got a basic understanding of True Type Fonts, all ready to start creating a 'subset-font' which only contains the glyphs actually present in the document. Did you know that some TTFs are in excess of 25mb !?
The last invoice I created with Excel has a single line-item and is about 37.5kb, while the ones my library is bashing out often have about 20 line-items and weigh-in at about 2kb The font I started using in Excel was Calibri. The TTF file for that bad-boy is something like 8mb.
No. I'm not a complete masochist. I did grab someone else's library to handle the FLATE compression used in the document. (but only after becoming frustrated with my inability to create a compatible bit-stream)
Even entering the 20 or so line-items for each client every month is getting a bit old now. Next step is to write a mobile-app with access to SMS messages, since I send "start work" and "stop work" messages and bill by the minute instead of 15 min blocks, as is the norm with the work I'm doing.
But none of the software-dev is what I consider uselessly wasted time. It's all been as Sebastian Lague puts it, a coding-adventure.
Coding Adventure: Rendering Text - YouTube
/ramble
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Sander Rossel wrote: I guess with my girlfriend breaking up I've even lost 65 kg
Well you're not supposed to be carrying her in your arms when you get on the scale.
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This is what the Boeing CEO has said in the Senate hearing. Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun faces grilling at Senate hearing - YouTube [^]
Having a non-engineer as the CEO of a life-critical high-tech engineering company; with that CEO having senior engineers advising him on technical matters - seems to be sub-optimal, isn't it? What value can such a CEO add in say, a design review meeting? What engineering judgement can he have?
IMHO, it should be the other way around - the CEO of such an engineering company should be an engineer, with senior business people advising him/her on stock market and other business matters.
What say you?
modified yesterday.
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I say "Yay". However were not both NASA Shuttle disasters the result of decisions by trained engineers.
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Agree.
However one point. NASA missions are kindof exploratory/research type of missions, and not as commercial as passenger aviation.
Research has its own risks/rewards, and not always guaranteed of success.
Whereas this is time tested, more than a century old aviation industry, where they are expected to (at least) maintain status quo, as regards passenger safety.
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Businesses aren't about the products - they are about the units. A CEO markets units, he doesn't really care what they are units of.
Sadly, the accountants are in charge of most businesses, and they know "the cost of everything and the value of nothing" (the late, great pTerry).
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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All accountants know is how to cut costs and so boost the next quaterly dividend and consequently their bonus. Their thinking is very short term. They don't appreciate what such short term thinking is doing to the company in the long term.
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
modified yesterday.
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If the CEO was such a great engineer the role of CEO would be wasted on him.
Instead, it's his job to be grilled at Senate hearings when his senior engineers and advisers mess up.
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In comparison, Pichai also faces Senate meetings. Though a Metallurgical Engineer by training, he has worked extensively on software, for which he is accountable. He has a strong engineering background.
Calhoun, on the other hand, I'm not sure whether he's worked on stress/fatigue/fracture/impact/dynamics kind of computations, which are so very critical in aerospace.
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You are spot on!
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
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The problem with dev/engineer types is they think they know everything, when in actuality nothing could be further from the truth. They generally suck at dealing with people, are immature, lack social skills. I could go on. This is not to say, non devs/engineers are inherently any better at this. It's to say that qualification alone does not a good CEO make.
The fact is, there's more than one type of intelligence. Denying that is no different than being a child who refuses to grow up and see the world while mentally living in their mom's basement. Denying that is no different than spending your entire life behind a computer thinking you're God, etc. because there's nobody else in your "world" to say otherwise.
Now, can an engineer make a good CEO? Sure. But a good CEO (or anyone) cannot know everything in the world. They need to be big picture people who can see trends, patterns, etc. that few can. The vast, vast majority of engineers are just the opposite - they focus on the minute details. Anyone can learn to be better at anything, but if spending 20+ years on CP has taught me anything is that very few people go outside their comfort zone and a lot of devs/engineers have lousy social skills.
Point is, only an engineer with zero life experience will think an engineer makes the best CEOs based on that qualification alone. If this sounds harsh, it's because you're thinking like an engineer and can't handle the truth. And senior business people tend to be more operations than big picture people. A good CEO brings people together, is a big picture person, has a vision with an idea of how the future will unfold. Operations would be more of a COO if anything for a company that size.
And yes, there are outliers. This is clearly a generalization.
This is not to say, non devs/engineers are intrinsically more mature. There are plenty of immature people in the world in various degrees. I'm just focusing on that group because we're on CP.
And no, this does not mean I think the Boeing CEO is good at their job.
And this doesn't mean a CEO should be ignorant of tech, the product, etc. They should have an understanding, but not necessarily on the same level as an engineer getting their hands dirty daily.
Jeremy Falcon
modified yesterday.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: A good CEO brings people together, is a big picture person, has a vision with an idea of how the future will unfold.
While I agree with all you said in your post, let me point out that good CEOs, by your definition, are relatively few. A lot of them are more in the "can my part of the pie get bigger?" category (see recent news about >50bn$ pay package).
My biggest gripe is with the "diode effect" of CEO compensation packages. If company reaches certain performance metrics they get a certain amount of $$. However if company performance falls short, they don't bring any money from home; they just don't get those bonuses. This is very visible when it is some kind of economic shock and CEOs scour the basement to clean the company's books because, hey, it's not their fault, there were just bad economic conditions. They will not get bonuses but next year everything will be rosy and they'll bring home lots of mullah.
It's like telling investors: "We win together, you loose by yourself".
And yes, I know I'm oversimplifying the issue.
Mircea
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: While I agree with all you said in your post, let me point out that good CEOs, by your definition, are relatively few. A lot of them are more in the "can my part of the pie get bigger?" category (see recent news about >50bn$ pay package).
1,000% agree with that, buddy.
Mircea Neacsu wrote: This is very visible when it is some kind of economic shock and CEOs scour the basement to clean the company's books because, hey, it's not their fault, there were just bad economic conditions.
Unfortunately, true genius is in short supply regardless of the role we choose in life. And well, people can be weak/corrupt regardless of role too.
For the genius bit and completely unrelated side note, a lot of businessy types talk about leaving behind a legacy (it's all ego driven). But, the more they think that way the more its obvious they can't see past 100-200 years tops. Unless you're Jesus or Genghis Khan, ain't nobody gonna remember you or your company in 1,000 years. Just illustrating the point, not all executives are geniuses.
Jeremy Falcon
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Boeings best years were under the leadership of a lawyer.
The previous CEO was Dennis Mullenburg, who was an engineer, and lasted less than 5 years.
While I agree someone more trained as an engineer should be the head of the company, that doesn't mean it should be an engineer. CEOs are the interface between the market and the company.
The bad CEOs face most of their attention on the market and little on what the company is doing to make sure the products are what the market wants and are of quality. They try to run the market, not the company. This is what Dave Calhoun did.
The good CEOs listen to the market, not try to run it, and spend their time on the products and issues within the company. They understand if you put out crap products that don't meet the needs of the market, you're going to lose the company. Calhoun failed to understand this.
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The decline of Boeing, HP, and other technology driven companies are all proof of your assertion.
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Let me turn that around: Were the senators grilling him engineers? If not, then they wouldn't know what pertinent questions to ask an engineer anyway, if an engineer was indeed needed to answer the questions.
And if the senators were provided with questions from engineers, then it's only fair the CEO should be able to consult with his engineers to respond to anything they ask him.
I've often been reminded that the job of the CEO is to maximize shareholder value. Reality not being so black and white however, if he ignores his engineers' warnings, then he's not doing his job either.
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"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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