[Monday: 3 miles on the treadmill; Today’s run: 3 miles]
From 1998 to 2019 I worked for PRPA in Ft Collins. I was the back-end support for a utility billing system which was used to crank out bills for municipal utility customers in Longmont and Ft. Collins. Toward the end of that time the software was getting old and some infrastructure parts were unsupported and things were just due for refresh or replacement.
The City of Ft. Collins finally got started with a years-long project of replacing the software. That progressed and I eventually retired from PRPA. Since then I’ve done a bit of remote consulting to help transition to the next generation of employees. But I am out of the loop now, except maybe for some very crusty old questions should they arise.
This last summer I learned that the Ft. Collins project hit some snags. The City had hired a company to install and customize the new software (even before I left), but the process did not go smoothly. Now the City and the Company are in legal process to try to sort out who wasted all of the money. See this article in The Colordoan.
Which of course means that they are still running the old software and will be for a few more years.
Besides keeping things tidy and humming, I also had the task long ago of writing some auxiliary bits. I did almost all of that in a scripting language called Perl. Early on I wrote a multi-file 10,000 line Perl program to translate the output of the billing program into HP-PCL printer formatting to put the data on the printed page the way they wanted it. And I wrote scripts to generate late notices and handle file transfers and other in’s and out’s over the years.
So here we are 20 years later and my Perl scripts are still formatting the bills, and probably will be for 3-4 more years. I don’t know if I will ever be called on to look at them again. It won’t break my heart if not, but I think I could do it.