#saleengine

Sales Engine is done and it took lots more effort than I would have hoped for. The way that the project seemed to be going at first and how it shaped up in the end were completely different than I would have expected when we were writing the first lines of code. The business intelligence parts of the program (where we had to call and analyse data from other parts of the code) took on a life of their own and often had to be written in entirely different ways than I was expecting so that they would run quickly enough.

Sales Engine took plenty of time but it seems that the hardest hours were in the end of the code. We didn't take the right approach on all of those pieces of code and they started bogging down and making both the program and our testing and coding cycle slower. We adopted a “get it shipped” mentality rather than going back and redoing some of the code that was slowing us down.

If I were to start the project again I would start with making sure that the different classes stayed out of each other's business and use a more object oriented approach. This would allow my code to remain simpler and be more reusable than it was. It would also have made the program (and our development process) faster.

Sales Engine as a project has been a good step on the path to becoming a developer because it has made me look at the way to approach these projects differently (better). I still wouldn't call myself a developer as there are still many development tasks that I can see being faced with but not knowing how to tackle.