I recently changed role. From a programmer, I became a designer. I suspect that its because of my English skills(among my colleagues only the more senior ones have good English) and not really my knowledge on the project and the framework we are using. With only five months into the project and no training whatsoever on the framework we are using, I doubt if I qualify to be a designer. I think they just needed someone to write the design specification They even assigned me to a different module of the project. Its was my first time to see those APIs and tools. Its not the skills that I don’t have but the knowledge on the API and on the problem domain. I am driving blindly at this point.

My first assignment was to revise a design specification. All is going well until the development stage. The developer did not obey the specification. He has some good reasons. I did made some mistakes like not checking if the static method is public and not reading the code thoroughly. But the others are really show-stoppers. They did not tell me that I can not use the old scripts because it is already not supported. They did never told me that the class that is supplying the connection to the database is also not supported. Its a freaking utility class that I assumed that I should not even care about its implementation. The developer who I was working with knows more about the what we are doing(warts and all). Compounding the problem is the fact that all of the knowledgeable developers are in a different location. The new programmers(we are only two here) are isolated. Knowledge flow is a bit limited.

Enough ranting for now. A lot of fire fighting is needed tomorrow.