Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

So I’m just sitting in my cube, trying to get some work done today and my boss walks up right behind me and starts talking to our systems administrator. Our system administrator asks him about a meeting he’s having in his office. My boss says (in a low voice so as not to attract my attention): “We’re talking to these guys about outsourcing some of our development. Yeah we just have too much work to do.”

Of course I’m one of the main developers on the site. If there was ever a sign that it is time to start looking for a new job, this has to be it. Usually, you don’t hear anything about what management is going to do around here. Everything is totally up in the air and there is no sense of security at all.

With any luck, they will just be looking for development help on the rudimentary work like creating HTML templates and designs for our many affiliated Web sites. It is very interesting timing though, considering it is timed perfectly to lay off workers before the new year begins. I’ll just have to wait and see what the
future holds for me. Que Sera, Sera!

The miramar air show runs this weekend. I’ve seen the Blue Angels fly by my window here at work yesterday and today. The weather has been really warm these past few days. I guess our summer was delayed a little bit this year.

I’m busy as ever with work - my boss always has plenty of work for me to do. Last night I put in some overtime and worked until 7:15pm. It was good though because I got a major project launched that I’ve been working on for quite a while. It’s basically some statistics and reporting function for our web site, nothing exciting.

I might be getting a new computer here at work. After I pointed out to my boss that a 1Ghz pentium III is pretty slow for a software engineer. Everyone else in my department has a 2.4Ghz pentium 4 as a bare minimum. We shall see how everything works out over the next couple of weeks. With any luck, I’ll have something before next month.

As usual, I’m sitting around at work because my boss told me that he wanted to get some code launched tonight. Meanwhile, my boss sits in a meeting and I’m supposed to be off of work right now. Of course he didn’t really ask me to stay late, so I guess I have every right to just walk out the door right now. I think I will just send out the instructions of what needs to be launched and then call it a day.

Today was a busy day at work and I managed to get a lot of work done. This despite the fact that my boss held a two-hour meeting to discuss IT projects. The funny part is that a lot of the stuff we are discussing are operations issues and don’t really have any impact on the developers or customer support people.

Recently, I’ve been working on a new business experiment that seeks to find out if a successful business can be built upon “The Wisdom of the Crowds”. Based on a popular book, the idea is to get a large group of people together to help build and grow a business. The idea for the business is decided upon by the crowd as is the way in which the business should be run.

Initially, the site attracted a lot of people who were fascinated by the idea. A lot of the fun in the beginning was for people to come up with ideas for a new business and then have the crowd vote on them. The idea which received the most votes would be the business that The Business Experiment (TBE) #1 would focus on.

Well now the business has been decided upon and it is time to set to the task of building this business. It seems a lot of the crowd has deserted after the initial decision making process. This is mostly due to the fact that there are no short-term incentives to attract people and encourage them in the building of the business. It seems that coming up with the idea was the most intersting facet of TBE. Once that process ended, the crowd dispersed.

I think I have the slowest computer in the whole office here. I started work here nearly 5 years ago. Since then I have been using the same computer the whole time. It is basically a Pentium III 1GHZ box with 512MB of RAM. It’s okay for browsing the web and reading e-mail, but beyond that, it’s way past it’s prime.

Over the years, I have seen my co-workers receive numerous upgrades. A couple of our managers have dual 19″ flat panels while I was using dual 17″ CRTs up until just recently. So we have managers (who mainly read e-mails and compose Word documents) and call center representatives using 3GHz Pentium 4s, while I’m trying to do heavy development work in Developer Studio and Microsoft SQL Server.

I hate it when a company runs totally “Ass-backwards”. They may listen to the needs of the Graphic designers who require the latest Dual-G5 machines to create their nifty keen images, but the needs of the developers are sorely overlooked. One of these days my computer is going to go “poof” and totally fry and I’ll lose a lot of my saved documents. At that point, they will probably just replace my computer with another outdated relic from the 20th century.

I guess I really haven’t mentioned it here before, but since most of our developers have left my company, I have been designated the official bug-fix handler. This means that I work solely on problems in our code developed by other people.

I’ll admit that I am responsible for developing a lot of the code. It’s simple enough to work on my own code, but every time I have to fix a bug in some other area of the application, I really have to run a lot of tests and study the code in order to understand how everything works.

The strange thing is that most of the bugs that are being reported are in other people’s code and not mine. This makes my job even more difficult. Anoter negative aspect of this new job role is that I don’t get the time to learn new technologies or to really be creative in developing new features. But I guess if they haven’t noticed my creativity in the past four years, I don’t think they ever will.

Last night I had to put in 3 and 1/2 hours of overtime to get a stupid e-mail blast done. My project manager said that it had to be perfect and work in all browsers so I converted the entire stylesheet to standard HTML. It only took me about 4 hours to do it, but that’s four hours I really didn’t want to spend at work.

So I was all ready to install our new Linux server at the hosting facility yesterday. It’s easy because it’s just down the street. Only problem was it wasn’t easy because I was busy-as-hell yesterday fixing one bug after the next. On top of that, my project manager was giving me tasks left and right so I never got time to go down there.

Today, I am going to give it another try and go down there over lunch. I’ve been putting off this task for too long now and it will be great to get this done and over with. I have some big plans for the new server so I can’t wait to get it installed and online.

We got a lot of rain last night here in San Diego. The weatherman said that we are going to get a lot more over the next few days. Not the best type of weather for the upcoming three-day weekend, but what can you do?

I think I am finally starting to get over this cold. I think it is something more like the flu. It probably had a limited effect since I already had the flu once this year. It’s weird being sick for 10 days straight. It seems like my immune system is going in slow motion.

On a positive note, I did manage to go to work every day this week. I’m sure my co-workers didn’t appreciate me being there when I’m sick. I am continuing work on numerous bug fixes and feature additions as always.

Currently, I am studying some new computer technologies that will enhance the web services that we offer through Orvado. I read an amazing statistic that said the percentage of adults in America between the age of 22 and 39 that own an MP3 player is 10%. That’s quite a lot of people. Experts are anticipating new uses for MP3 players and Cell Phone makers are planning to incorporate MP3 players into phones.

Currently, the company where I work is experiencing a problem accessing our internal sites. It’s lunchtime though so it’s a good time for me to take a break. My company has been experiencing DNS problems over the past week and it has really been a problem for our service.

Even though there are a lot of smart people who work here, there still seems to be something missing. It’s probably proper testing and quality assurance before a major change is made to the network or the systems. It seems like we are in such a rush to get things done, it just gets done quick, it doesn’t get done RIGHT.

I’ve made several posting on this matter in the past. Sorry to innundate you with repeated posts on this subject, but it’s just too easy to bash the company I work for. And more than that, it’s just plain fun! Thankfully, the company that I co-founded, has had a MUCH BETTER track record. I’d like to wish everybody a Happy Valentine’s Day!

This morning I woke up with a really nasty headache and sinus pain. Nevertheless, I went to work and suffered the whole day long through the pain. It wasn’t very much fun today. I would much rather have preferred to stay home and in bed. I’m not quite sure if this a symptom of the cold that I caught this past weekend or if it is another bug that I have caught.

I’m getting really sick of being sick the past couple of months. Seems like I have been sick more often then I have been healthy. I’m sure glad the cold season is almost over.

Today was another busy day at work. I spent a lot of the day building out e-mails for our clients. It’s funny that I spend all this time doing work for other clients and when I go into the time sheet system, I can only log time for our soccer tournament. I guess they didn’t plan the timesheet system too well before forcing us to use it.