Long silence

It's been over a month since my last post - I'm sorry about this. I have a horrible tendency to forget my blogs, as my MySpace friends can attest to. I have an excuse this time though - my workload has effectively doubled at the office, and I've had to budget my time recently.

I also spent some time down at my company's warehouse getting to know the warehouse staff and seeing the physical processes that drive the company. It was definitely an eye-opening experience - this was the first time I've ever visited a warehouse of any sort, and seeing them physically carry out the processes that I've helped to develop was gratifying in a way. It helped me to fully understand the ramifications of the decisions that I make when building the software that they'll use.

My spare time (hah!) has been spent getting the new bot up and running - so far, so good! :) I have a command-line version up and running that is fully configurable and about 70% functional - no hunting functionality is in, but harvesting works a charm. I've opened up beta applications on the Macrocrafter website, so you should hop over there if you're interested in helping me test.

The development process has been much easier this time around, I think. I wasn't very smart with the first few iterations of the harvest bot - during the alpha and beta periods I pretty much wrote EverHarvest by the seat of my pants, largely without a plan at all. The result was that after the command-line tests were complete, I had to completely rewrite the system because I had coupled it into the command-line project. This time, I'm developing the engine of the system completely separate from the UI - it's in its own separate assembly - which will make it *much* easier to move from the command-line interface to the graphical interface.

So these are the developments of late. Nothing earth-shattering, but lots of things to distract me from blogging. I'll try to keep up moving forward. =)