Justin Gets A New Nickname!

(Yes yes, re-reading about my adventures at Alcatraz is getting boring..)

I've acquired a new nickname around the office. "The Troublemaker." The past few days it seems as though people have forgotten my real name. "Hey, there's The Troublemaker!" they'll say. Or, "Hey, everyone's talking about you Troublemaker!" The funniest part of it all is that I had no idea what they were talking about until just yesterday.

Apparently I caused quite the scene with some of the work I've been doing! Who says software engineering can't be exciting?!?

The hallowed story is as follows. Some of you might be aware of my current work, I believe I've posted on it previously. I've been prototyping our Next-Generation © product in a new technology. So I've been trying a lot of new things out, things that aren't currently in the product, but seemed like fun things to try out. They let my lease get a little too long it seems.

In this prototype I implemented something that I thought would be an interesting idea. Instead of going to a completely new page to get help for something on the screen, why not have a little expandable panel that will show you information about everything on the page. You can think of something like Microsoft Word that has a little page that you can open and give you a little more help. That was my thinking. This would update as you moved around. It was simple enough to build, it only took about a half day, and once it was built I moved on to other things and didn't really think anything more of it.

A few weeks after building it I gave a demo on all the work I had done on the prototype to my group. Much to my surprise, everyone on the group liked this "information pane". They began to sing songs and compose sonnets announcing the birth of a great new age in "information pane"-ology. So we put it on the back-burner as a "hey, wouldn't it be neat if..." idea.

Last week I had a small meeting with our documentation group, where they were demoing their newly purchased technology that was going to hopefully be used by all groups. It was nice, but we got to asking if we could get a little more access or control to the raw documentation so that maybe my idea could come to fruition. They didn't really understand what we were getting at, so I agreed to send them a link to the prototype so they could see what we were going for. So after the meeting I sent them a link with a small blurb about how it might be useful.

I don't hear anything back, so I assume they're just working on other things. No big deal.

Then at the beginning of this week I get the new nickname. At first just in passing, then it becomes my call-sign.

Apparently the documentation people hate this new idea. According to my boss they feel threatened by it. My boss has had a few meetings with them about it.

Luckily, I've been insulated from all this. But I did get a shiny new nickname. "The Troublemaker." I'm think my movie part will best be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or maybe I can play it myself? (A beautiful segue into a future blog about my acting classes. Yes, I'm taking acting classes!)