Daniel Johnson, Jr.

As you may have read before, I’ve written the bridge applications that prepare clients’ payroll for a program we use to batch load into our payroll management system. Whenever I and now my coworker, whom I’m mentoring, finish one of these bridge applications, we update a master list of all the clients we’ve set up and email it to the other people in the organization that need it.

The person who normally runs the batch-loading program wasn’t available today, because she’s printing W-2′s for all of our client employees. So, the payroll specialist contacted me, and I ran it for seven of our clients. I estimate that it pulled payroll transactions for about 525 employees.

I love being able to help out in a pinch!

This morning I spent some time with a coworker, going over some changes I had made to the bridge applications we worked on last week. I also showed him what I did to make the other trucking company’s application work.

Afterward, he and I went upstairs to payroll to introduce him to the other payroll specialists, since he would be starting to work with them as well. We confirmed that a spreadsheet one of the specialists designed is going to be put into use by the client this week; so we’ll be able to develop an application to handle that payroll, too.

We also found out, from the gleeful expression on another payroll specialist’s face, that the bridge applications for the trucking companies went off without a hitch.

Today I showed a coworker how I develop a payroll bridge application. We both went through a development checklist I’d developed, and he said it really helped him a lot to understand the code a lot better than having looked it over all by himself.

We added everything in and even took care of some of the program errors, even to the point of making the program ready for the user population to use. But on a hunch, I decided to look at the output/transaction file to verify it was all in order.

We found that the transactions were not added to the file, so we’ll need to diagnose and fix it in the morning.

Once he gets up to speed in understanding how we build one of these applications, then he and I will be able to “divide and conquer” the next group of candidates.