Today was an interesting day. I started with a torture session at the JCC (my trainer calls the worst part “Fun with Foam” and promises it will get better some day). I had a call soon enough afterwards that I didn’t have time to drive to work, so I went home instead, took the call, and only then went to the office.
The afternoon started with another call, then my annual review (I live to fight another year!).
And then I got to have some fun. One of the projects I’m working on needs to gather some data from Lotus Notes calendars, and there was a group who had someone working on a tool to get that data. But they were having problems of various sorts, and they were stuck. Fortunately, one of my hobby projects for the last few years has taught me a lot about accessing Lotus Notes calendars from Python code, so I contacted the developer and offered to see if I had anything in my archives which might be helpful.
I didn’t – somehow, I’d not copied the relevant directory to my new Windows system (and this particular technique, using the COM bindings to Notes, only works on Windows). But I did have other Python/Notes code in hand, enough to remember how to start, and her Java code showed me what she was trying to do.
The next time I looked up, two hours had passed. And I had a working program (at least it worked in my environment!) to send her.
It’s been a while since I really dropped into flow on a technical project — it’s fun!