Really delayed update
It’s been months since I updated my blog. And that is because much have changed for me in those 7-8 months!
I decided to quit my job at Sony Computer Entertainment and return to my country, Greece. That’s because I needed to fulfill my military obligations and also to help out my father with our new family business, Valeni Boutique Hotel.
So I’ve been managing the hotel’s day to day operations and also trying to keep in touch with my programming side ( a professor of mine at UPenn once told me that the average memory of a software engineer is a year and a half tops… I’ve been coming to the conclusion that it’s less than that… )
So I’ve developed a couple of tools in C# to help me out with my day to day tasks… These include creating weekly rotas for our staff, payroll, changing hotel rates and creating offers and also creating a consistent front desk – it’s really frustrating when different employees give different rates to potential guests… So I needed to make sure that everyone was looking at the same rates and also provided the same information to the customers. Therefore I made a tool that calculates rates based on arrival and departure dates, shows available offers and also shows text that the employee can simply read to the customer ( for really lazy people ). Of course it’s better if everybody has their own personal style and tone, but the information should be consistent.
I also made a tool to create weekly rotas. This tool allows you to add employees with graded abilities. For example John might be good as a Front Office clerk but no so good as a bartender. So you can add that information into the tool and when you create rotas you can click on the Check button to see if there is a problem with a shift. The tool will give you a warning if a position ( like Front Office, Bar, Restaurant etc) has not been covered by an employee who is good at it. That was actually pretty complicated to implement but it works well enough.
This tool is also directly related to payroll. Every shift is recorded and at the end of the month you get a nice form that shows the salary of each employee based on their hours or other deals that we might have with them.
At the moment I am preparing to join the army as it is mandatory in my country so I’ll be out in 9 months. I hope that when I get out people will be using twitter instead of facebook and Arrested Development will be back on air again.
See ya all later
