Task, dated six months ago, originally assigned to someone else.

The task becomes mine; it is marked low priority. Eventually it works its way up to the top of my to-do list.

Like so many of my tasks, the end result is a web page that displays some information as a chart, table, or graph. Like so many tasks, there are ambiguities in the spec. Does the “date” column in the chart represent the date that the initial event happened? The date that the situtaion started to change? Or the date that the change was fully realized? That’s OK, as the table that contains most of the information has at least three different columns for dates, so if one doesn’t work, we can try another.

We want this information on a page because there isn’t an easy way to get at it. Sure, someone could write an ad hoc database query every time this information was needed, but what if it’s needed by someone who doesn’t have database access? Based on the current state of the universe, I expect that this is actually a pretty uncommon use case: The one person who would most want to know this information does have database access.

Fun fact: The information that would populate this chart is emailed to the third parties to whom it applies. But we do not send copies of the emails to ourselves. If we had been bcc’ing ourselves on those automated emails, we could just search our email instead of looking things up in a chart. Sometimes it’s nice to look at things on a chart! I understand. I am planning on adopting much of the code that generates the email and using it to populate my chart.

Secret: I am pretty sure that one of the requested columns for this chart is impossible. So far I have not found any trace of that information in the database. I have read through the code that does all the things that relate to this chart, and not one single function has a variable representing this information.