  For any of you that know me well, you will know that for the past few (I say few, must be close to a year by now) months I've been waiting to get some freelance web development work that has been promised from my dad's company.
This has become known as 'The Rail Gourmet Project', and is worth a lot of money to me. Well, I've had it now for about a month now, and have been working hard on it, but have only just recently made a breakthrough, and I can finally see that the end is in sight – that I can complete it, which is important because I've only got until Friday to finish and ship it back to them. The problem is not the coding itself. It's true I have not done anything quite like this before (adding a security system to a site), but you only learn by doing, and I'm a quick learner, so this is fantastic experience for me. The problem is the fact I'm continuing on from a developer who is VERY new to coding, and as such has not written the best code. I'm trying to do two things at once: learn how to do new things in a professional way, while learning how to decode what someone has written in an unprofessional way.
Not an easy task. I find it hard enough to read code from people that know what they are doing, so this is a nightmare. In all fairness to the guy, he's very good considering the little time he has been coding for, and I'm sure that one day he could make a fine developer, but it's still not quite good enough for large project like this, He's making silly little mistakes, mistakes which I'm having to tidy up.
I just hope that I'm able to decode what he's done well enough to make good on my end of the deal. So, wish me luck, if I manage to do this on time (which has to happen, or I'm dead), drinks are on me. 
