Jamie Higgins, Software Developer

Oh hi there, I didn’t see you there, come in, let me get you a chair. So, I suppose I should explain where I disappear off after the last post. Really, I just wanted to focus more on work since at that point, I already had all the reports that I needed for college written so there wasn’t a huge incentive for me to continue writing more posts. I should have, just to have done it, but here we are. ...

Monday So while I didn’t get to work on anything major today, I did get told a bit more information (mainly because I had to ask for it, rather than them just telling me). They need to setup an AD account for me that’s tied to the customer, for whatever work they ask me to do I guess. I’ll be heading down to the customer on Wednesday as they’re on the North side of Dublin, so about a half hour walk from the offices. ...

Monday Well, there wasn’t any work done on Monday, due to the fact that we were told that they would be having cleaners in the apartment so we wouldn’t be able to work, so today consisted of traveling from Sligo to Dublin and getting settled into the new place. It’s so nice to actually have my own room that I don’t have to share with another person, alongside having a proper cooker and washing machine. It’s the little things. ...

Monday I got into work and the first thing I knew I had to do was sort out all of my open tickets, as I knew there was going to be a meeting with the rest of the CRM support team about all of our tickets. I had a look at one customer who had a dialog that has been broken for about 2 weeks and checked to see if it just decided to work again. ...

Monday Yeah, this portal is starting to get ridiculous. I spent almost the whole day working on getting login to work again and I’m starting to believe that it isn’t even out problem at this stage, but Google’s. Only the students can’t log into this portal; the employers section is fine, as the CRM deals with the logins for that. Guess I continue looking into it tomorrow. I did say I almost spent the whole day working on it, I spent about half an hour on a ticket just explaining to a customer how to edit the Site Map for Dynamics as they needed to add more entities to it. They also had a question about filtering data in one lookup field with the current value of another, but I was so busy with the portal that I didn’t get back to them, but they figured it out anyway. So that was an easy ticket. ...

Monday was another Bank Holiday in Ireland, so I played Dark Souls for most of the day and took the bus back to Galway. Tuesday Can we just pretend that this day didn’t happen and move on? So, the plugin that I modified last week decided to break in the morning and I spent a total of 6 hours trying to fix it to no avail. What makes the whole thing better is the fact that I can’t debug it because of the way the workflow is set up. Also, it decided to stop throwing exception and just say it finished, without inputting any new data into the system. Fantastic, I just went home, went for a run and ate some sticky toffee pudding and felt better about myself. ...

Monday No tickets, nothing interesting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Tuesday Spent some time trying to update a plugin for a customer so that when they run the plugin that create duplicates of the current record (with different IDs, don’t worry), it will add in the parent record to the children records as a lookup field. Still working on it though. Other than that, just more DLP courses and other bits of training. Wednesday We started the day off with a meeting with the customer I’m trying to update the plugin with. There were some other open tickets talked about then as well. ...

Monday So today mostly consisted of meetings, the first being with one team member through Skype where we discussed configuring the CRM for Mobile/Tablet Offline Sync, with the second being a general CRM meeting about open tickets that we’re currently working on. All of this took up most of the morning. I then received a ticket in the evening where a person wanted to give another person access to the system, but they didn’t even have an account to begin with, so I can’t do much. All I could say is “Get your IT team to make an account and then I can give it the user roles”. ...

Monday Another week, another set of tickets. Well, not yet, just stuff from last week so far. I continued where I left off last week with a ticket where a user was having an issue where if a person was logged in their portal but not into the CRM, images would not display on the page. This was down to Web Resources and the fact that you can only see Web Resources if you’re logged in. However, they use their portal with their customers who won’t have accounts on the CRM, so I needed to find a solution. That came in the form on Web Files. ...

Since Monday is a Bank Holiday in Ireland, we didn’t have work, so this week starts from Tuesday instead. Tuesday It was really a slow start to the day, I was just following up on tickets from last week that the customer still hasn’t responded to yet. Other than that, I started using the Dynamics Learning Portal (DLP) to research what goes into making sure that an instance of Dynamics is fully compatible with mobile, such as offline records and customising views to make sure that they also look good on mobile. We got our headshots that we took last Thursday today, so I went and updated my company email and LinkedIn with it. Only problem is that I don’t have glasses on in it, only because of the glare, but it’ll do. ...