How did I ever enjoy doing this stuff?
Personal training results in a ton of paperwork, between contracts, health appraisals, fitness evaluations, workout sheets, client notes, and all sorts of other data. I’m finding things like processing of fitness evaluations to be a rather tedious manual process involving looking up numbers in all sorts of tables and stuff.
The obvious solution would be to computerize all this data. I haven’t been terribly impressed with the personal trainer software currently on the market, so I figured I’d whip up some stuff of my own to do what I want. I wanted to keep it really quick and simple, so I decided to put together an Access database along with some forms and reports. About an hour into this process I was overcome with the feeling of immense hatred and frustration at the process of software development, even on the smallest of scales. It felt downright painful just to put a few forms on top of some tables. I don’t know how I managed to do this stuff for so many years. I hate thinking about interfaces, edge cases, error trapping, all of that stuff. I don’t know why that is, exactly. Perhaps because it all feels so far removed from tangible reality or something. Anyway, I’m going to give it one or two more tries to see if my opinion changes, but that’s it. Worst case, some friends of mine are working on some personal trainer software of their own so I may just see about piggybacking off of what they’re doing.
In other news, I’m finally registered and scheduled for my exam. It’ll be this coming Tuesday. Woohoo! I’m feeling fairly confident at this point, although I need to do some more brushing up on how to deal with certain special populations and better commit various tables of numbers to memory.
