Those who have swords, and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed will inherit the earth.

What I am doing this week

• Continuing to complete my Appeals database App at work (This will be ongoing until completion)
• Worked on the features for the group project.

Appeals Database

Made some progress in the Appeals database this week. First, I was asked by my boss's boss to write up a proposal. I actually hadn't in the past and only really documented requirements. Luckily, my boss had at template he used before for other projects at previous jobs. I just filled out the sections the best I could with the track changes set on. I submitted that to my boss for review and waiting to hear what he would want to add.

I didn't let that stop me from making more changes to the database. I started to refactor the GORM code to separate files so I could separate the structure and the functionality. I also started a new file for the AVV import job. I found a library that extends the SSH Golang library and allows me to make SFTP connection to an Optum server. Optum manages the online Appeals for the connector. They store it in some database and then every night they extract the delta changes in the database and upload to their SFTP server for my scripts to go fetch and upload to the appeals database.

Since the new appeals will have to be uploaded to a SQL server I decided that I will rewrite the current process that uses WinSCP, batch script, and a VB script. Way too many moving parts. Also, the script doesn't support the case if the script failed to run one night and the next night there are two delta files to download and upload. I need this process to be all encompassing.

I have already transformed csv files before so that part won't be too difficult. I started to build out the module that would connect to the SFTP server and download the pipe delimited .dat files. First thing though was I was hard coding way too many passwords into the process and decided to see if there was an easy way to use a YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML) file for configuration. That way if the password for the database or SFTP server ever change you can just modify the text file YAML and not have to recompile the code.

With the configuration set I passed the password to the SFTP module and was able to open a connection and traverse the folders and find all the files. Of course, I was doing it during the day and there were no files to grab so I could test. I will probably suspend the normal process so I can really test out grabbing files via Golang.

Software Engineering Group Features

I think the project is moving slowly as we decide the features for the previous requirements. We finally broke up the bunch into essentially frontend, backend, and miscellaneous group. Backend is really handling the database side of things. The frontend was split up into two groups. One group is tackling the client side of things and the other group will take on the admin portal.

I assumed that we had lab 4 and 5 due this week but my group members mentioned that only lab 3 was due. Next lab we need to break down the big features that might take longer than a week and create sub features or task. I guess it is a sort of calm before the storm.