Wake just before the alarm from a mildly disturbing dream, though I believe I slept straight through the night for a change. It took a couple of minutes to fight the "it" that wanted to stay on bed, stay home, stay asleep, but I won the battle today. Up, and through the morning routine and off to work.
Watched a campy and mindlessly violent movie last night (that actually didn't factor into the dreams). The movie had its moments, but I couldn't help but wonder what Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez would have done with the premise.
A relatively productive day, puzzling out a problem for one of my developers. A challenge we have is that everyone we're dealing with is in constant motion - when you deal with investments and markets, there is an inevitable level of action required, from early in the morning before the markets open, until well after they close. These teams are understaffed, and we're in a classic bind: the development work we're doing is to automate a number of the critical, but labor intensive, processes the business must do, but they spend so much time actually doing them that there is little time for them to spend with us to explain what they're doing. My job of late, and it's personally rewarding, is to become a business expert (to a degree) and help quickly translate the business needs into something that a developer with little to no business experience can understand.
I'm finding that this type of work is really what interests me: finding the patterns, abstracting them, and getting someone unfamiliar with certain concepts to be able to apply them in code. I've been struggling with staying engaged with my work, and if this isn't the door on, it might be the key.
