Vacation, IVR, and coding
I won't be lame and apologize for not posting more often, because that would probably be the standard preface for every blog entry. (But you know I'm thinking it.)
I went on vacation to Oahu, in Hawaii this month for 10 lovely days. It's the longest vacation I've ever taken with my husband in the 6 years we've been together. We were a little worried about how we'd get along after 10 days on an island with constant togetherness. It was just fine, so I guess that means I married the right guy :).
Since this is my work blog, I try to write about something at least vaguely Speech-related or Microsoft-related. On our way to Hawaii, we missed our connecting flight in Los Angeles thanks to some mechanical problem Alaska Airlines had in Seattle. Unfortunately, that was the last flight to Honolulu that night so we were stuck. Having gone to college in Los Angeles, I love the city. But not the airport area, without a change of clothes or a toothbrush, and no car. (Because nobody walks in LA!)
So at the airport, channeling my previous life as a frequent flier, I got on the phone with American Airlines to ensure we were on the next flight out in the morning. Like most airlines, American has an IVR system. Theirs does speech, and it does it pretty well. It asks for your flight number, confirmation code, and can find your reservation even if you don't know those things, but know the date, time and your destination. Pretty cool. It does go a little overboard on "personality" - the female voice is just a little *too* friendly and apologetic, but I may be oversensitive about this after hearing a few talks on VUI design. But it was really cool to interact with this system, since I work on a product with this technology. After it gathered all my information, and I was on hold for an agent for a few minutes, I was deeply disappointed when the agent asked me for all of it again. I read, or heard somewhere that call center agents do this to buy themselves some time to finish up their notes on the previous call but still reduce hold times. I wonder if this is really true, or they just don't actually get the info from the IVR?
That story wasn't too exciting, but I just like those times when my work life intersects with my regular life. It almost made up for the fact that we spent the night in a sketchy airport hotel, and not the tropical resort we had originally planned. We did squeeze in a trip to In 'N' Out burger, which is conveniently located right near the airport. And that did make the evening better. If you're ever in California, Las Vegas, or Phoenix, definitely check out In N Out. Get a Double Double and ask for your fries "well done". It's the best!
One really cool thing I did this week was attending a meeting where a few feature team PMs and Development Leads were discussing the approach to take on how to solve a specific bug that's important to our TAP customers, involving volume controls. Since I don't own any specific features in the product, I'm not usually at these kinds of meetings, but since it was a customer issue, I was invited this time. Some different ideas for approaching the problem were tossed around and discussed, and a high level solution/decision was made at the end (not at the implementation details level, but just *how* we are going to solve the problem). I'm happy with the decision, and I hope our customers will be as well.
I also started my "Mathematical Principles in Computer Science" class at UW this week. It's really a C++/data structures class with a little bit of math. The first assignment is to build classes for a Sudoku game-solving program. Not too hard, except that we have to do it in pairs. For me, programming has always been a solitary sort of activity. So now I have to figure out how to write a spec/design doc and the code with another person. I suppose splitting up the code will be easy but there's no good way to split up the design doc since the initial problem is pretty small. We've decided to each write up the design and then somehow squish it together to make one document. What I really like about the degree program I'm in is that it seems like it teaches good software engineering practices, not just writing code or learning about tricky algorithms. It's the first programming class where I've had to write a design doc before writing the program, and they both contribute equally to the grade. In addition, for the next assignment, the professor is going to make us use *someone else's* code and design doc to actually write the program to solve the puzzle. Thus teaching us that it's important to design and write code that others can understand. So that's what I'll be spending my weekend on. What about you?
