Ahhh, back from Holiday - I've not felt this refreshed in a long long time. I go back to work on Monday, when I will be diving in to all the code that has changed since I've been away - I'm looking forward to it.
I spoke to a couple of people at work and it seems like the project is going well. I realized a couple of silly architectural mistakes while I was away, and it turns out the team has noticed them too and gone ahead and fixed them in the same way I was going to - I like it :-)
When I left I knew that there where two situations that were possible to return to, firstly, that no-one had any idea that I was talking about, and that it was all going to be a mess. Or, two, people had a rough (or maybe good) idea what I was talking about and it would be making good progress when I came back. My understanding is the latter situation has prevailed, and given the tight schedule this is good news.
Its always good to see the first code cut against a new architecture - its a relief to know that the architectural design can be implemented in code, and that the architect (me in this case) wasn't completely on crack when they dreamed it up. You're always know it will work, but once there is code you know just that little bit more - of course I've had lots of help from the many good people around me in trying to get the right blend of solution-in-architecture vs. solution-in-implementation, which helps a lot.
Egypt was great - the flight out was a little scary (although not as scary as acme's). We had the hydrolic systems fail in the right wing, and we had to turn around two hours out of LGW and return. Not particularly pleasant.
When we arrived in Egypt it was raining. "Uh Oh" we thought. It turns out that it has been the coldest winter in living memory in Egypt - but even so, it was hot enough to get a tan during the day, even if it did drop as soon as the sun went down (and that's to be expected in the desert).
However, now I'm back, and ready to go to work - some really serious work as well. I'm looking forward to work more than I have in a long time - and that can only be a good thing.
