Today was the first day of class. As I waited for the bus this morning a nervous looking student reached for a schedule from his back pocket. I assumed it was a copy of the bus schedule, but it turns out it was a print out from Student Link, the system I maintain and largely developed. He was double checking when his first class was.

Every time I see a reference “in the wild” to Student Link it gives me a big jolt of pride. My work ethic is pretty over the top on its own, but that bumps it up another notch.

Opening of School is an interesting week of walking on eggshells, waiting for the systems to crash. I sit there with performance monitor checking how things are going. Watching the raw logfiles to make sure they’re still being written. Monitoring WebPay to see if the gateway is up. Data’s flying left and right, but I still wait for the call or email or page saying it’s all gone awry. Fortunately for the end users it goes better each and every time. Unfortunately for me it gets a little less thrilling.

Today 32,623 students used Student Link. We took in 8.5 million in payments. 1.5 of that was in electronic checks, an idea I hatched, and saved the U tens of thousands of dollars in transaction fees.

It was a good day.