Today was my last day on a project in which I wrote some XSLT and an XML Schema for this web service front end thingie for a large service information database. I’ve been doing this for six weeks, or about two months calendar time, and while it hasn’t been the most rewarding of projects in terms of intellectual challenge, I’ve had some fun in the process.

Today, on my last day, they changed the design of the whole application. No more XSLT, no schema. We won’t need them, thank you very much. Actually, no web service beyond an ftp service left masquerading as one, either, but I was never involved in any of the Java coding, so I don’t care about that. What I do care about is that I just spent six weeks of doing, it turns out, nothing.

This is what you live for when you’re a consultant. Usually, they won’t throw away what you’ve done until you’ve left, but it does happen, and it just did.