Computing coursework is such an emotional rollercoaster!

OK, so perhaps it's not that emotional. Not as emotional as the current episodes of Battlestar Galactica anyway. (There, shameless plug inserted. Best show ever!) I've certainly changed my feelings towards it more than a few times though.

To start with I thought it would be nice and fun, because when I have something to aim for I genuinely enjoy writing code and learning new languages. My desire to write a script that framed pictures virtually for work led to me learning a lot of PHP and producing quite a nice script! Similarly my desire for a nice website, while long and arduous, has eventually come to be. I really like the website as it is now, with the Twitter panel and links to all my social networking profiles. That said, I still have a bunch of things I need to fix since I upgraded to Drupal 6. Perhaps something to do after I finish writing this.

After a while my computing got a bit boring, mostly because I vehemently loathe the Systems Life Cycle that you first get lumbered with in GCSE ICT and continue to enjoy hate for the rest of your life as a computer developer. I much prefer the concept of RAD, (Rapid Application Development, presumably. I'll look it up on Wikipedia later.) where you get the smallest amount of information possible from the customer and then make a simple program that evolves over time. I just dislike reports though.

I then went through a time of hating the whole affair because the school computers are so slow you wonder if it'll be faster to write your Visual Basic.Net project in BASIC on a Commodore 64. I mean, really, it's silly. The other day it took the computer literally half an hour to log on to my roaming profile (which isn't very large; they have a profile size limit of 30MB that doesn't include documents) and load up my solution in VB.NET 2008. I mean, the computers have gigabit ethernet connections, and they're at least AMD64 3400+! This isn't 1989!

Shortly after that I got very disgruntled at the way .NET and OLE handles databases. It still seems rather silly to load the database into memory, then populate a dataset with the data, then bind stuff to the dataset, then use a bindingsource to manipulate the recordset, etc etc etc. I'm getting the hang of it now, though, and I can see some of the reasoning behind doing it that way.

Now I just have to finish off my program with unreasonable amounts of error checking and write all the documentation, testing, evaluation, analysis and design that goes with it.
Yes, I know I should have done the first two parts already.

Apologies to those who know nothing about programming, this was probably an incestuously boring blog post to read. Even the spellcheck doesn't recognise half the words. Then again, it doesn't recognise 'recognise' either. Damn American dictionaries.