geek ramblings » Work

Merry Christmas to me!

Dougal — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:26:58 +0000

I get to unwrap one of my presents early this year, and it ranks up there with some of the best — a new job! I’ll be working with Alex King and the other fine folks at Crowd Favorite. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to work with this crew to tackle some great projects.

Four years ago, when I joined in on the development of WordPress, it was just a fun thing to do on the side. There was never any expectation of any kind of reward, it was just fun to be a part of a project that so many people found useful. As time went on, WordPress evolved into a more generally useful web site development platform, and businesses like Crowd Favorite have sprung up to help organizations take advantage of its power and flexibility.

I’m sure Alex would agree that it is truly rewarding to be able to take what previously was hobby, and turn it into a livelihood. Of course, it’s not just WordPress — there will be projects based on other web application platforms, and I’m sure we’ll be dealing with Perl code as well as PHP, just as I have in my other work for the past many years. I enjoy the variety, so bring it on!

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Another new start

Dougal — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 03:19:53 +0000

About two weeks ago, I started a new job (which explains at least part of my blogging lull, you see). I’m working on Free IQ, which is a streaming media site for entrepreneurs. There’s more to it than just the streaming media (you can upload video, audio, PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, etc.), but I’m still learning the ins and outs, so I don’t know the full scope yet.

When I interviewed, they were favorably impressed by the fact that I’m a WordPress developer. This is something that our industry is seeing more and more of — involvement in open source projects is often a good selling point in your resume. Several people have come by to ask me WordPress questions, and more than once I’ve been asked, “you’re the WordPress guy, right?” I haven’t actually done anything WP-related, yet, but I think that might come down the pipe one day.

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Buggy clock

Dougal — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:17:56 +0000

I’ve discovered a bug in my clock that’s been causing me all sorts of headaches. It’s really messing with my ability to complete projects when others are expecting them. If I can’t find a fix soon, I’m definitely going to have to get a new clock.

See, the problem is that this clock only counts 24 hours in a day. I think I need to upgrade my clock to a 36 hour model. That would probably give me enough time to do all my work, spend some time with my family, and maybe even get some sleep every once in a while. Yep, a 36 hour clock is what I need. Does anybody know where I can get one of those?

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We interrupt this silence for a brief message…

Dougal — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 21:24:01 +0000

I’m a working stiff with three kids and an hour-each-way commute. I think that’s all the explanation needed for the long break, right?

It’s not like I didn’t have anything to write about. Since my last post, Jamie had a birthday, Mary did some really cool stuff with squids for a science project (and I can’t believe I forgot to take pictures!), Claire started walking, I had to give our dog an emergency midnight bath, and Susan started finals in her grad classes. Plus I’ve had plenty of stuff going on at work that might have been worthy of writing about (and some of it was even good! ).

It just comes down to being busy, and having higher priorities. But fortunately, it hasn’t been the bad kind of busy, for the most part. Just the average, run-of-the-mill kind of busy that fills your life without leaving much time to write about it.

Suffice it to say that I’m still here. I do intend to write some more posts soon. I’m hoping to do some more fun stuff with WordPress (I started to look at a minor optimization for the post-custom fields, but haven’t had time to finish it up). I’m still tinkering with a theme change for this site, which I hope to get ready in time for an upgrade to WordPress 2.1. I’ve got a ton of photos that I need to upload to Flickr. There’s…stuff.

But first, I have to work on organization. Something that I’ve been studying a lot lately. But that’s a topic for another post….

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Knock, knock…

Dougal — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:41:55 +0000

I know, I know… I haven’t been very active on the blogging front lately. Once again I’ve been sucked into a swirling vortex of job and home projects, with little-to-no time for participating in blogdom. I’ve managed to keep up with most of the latest memes, and I’ve added a few new del.icio.us bookmarks, but there’s been no opportunity to develop any nifty code or write about the subject of the day.

I’ve got eight draft posts in my queue, and three of those are no longer timely, and so I’ll probably end up deleting them. Of the remaining five, one is about how to use the WordPress object cache in plugins, another is about separation of presentation from business logic in HTML::Mason (a mod_perl web framework), one is an explanation of what blog ping services are, and the last two are non-technical. The ping service post is the only one that I’ve actually written any content for, and I started writing that one nearly a year ago. The others are basically nothing more than links to articles I was going to comment on, or placeholders to remind me that I wanted to write something about the subject.

Most of my time lately has been tied up with my day job. We’ve had some big projects on tight deadlines, and we developers had to really push to get things done on schedule. I’ve had to work late at the the office several times in the past few weeks, and that throws off our schedule for getting home projects done.

At home, we’ve been trying to finish building the rest of our bedroom funiture (we’ve almost finished the final piece, a wardrobe). And we still need to finish stripping and repainting the dressers for the girls’ room. We’re also trying to get things cleaned up in general, in preparation for out-of-town family visitors for Independence Day weekend. We’re going to have a very crowded house, with lots of kids to wrangle. If you don’t hear from me again after July 4th, it might mean that we didn’t survive.

And I’m not the only one who’s busy. Susan has her hands full keeping up with Jamie’s summer program, therapies, and doctor visits, Mary’s activities, and taking care of baby Claire, along with everything else. And when she can grab a spare minute on her computer, she’s been working on the website for her 20th class reunion.

So, for the three of you who were just about to delete me from your list of sites to visit, don’t abandon me yet! I should be posting more articles soon-ish. In the meantime, why don’t you take a break and enjoy the sounds of summer?

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A Software Development Analogy

Dougal — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:20:03 +0000

Alice takes her car to a repair shop on Monday. She walks inside and talks to Bob, the customer service representative behind the counter. “My car seems to work pretty well, but occassionally it makes an odd noise. When can you have it fixed, and how much will it cost?”

Bob smiles and replies, “we can have your car ready by noon on Friday, and it will cost $200.” Alice says that this is acceptable, and leaves her car to be worked on.

On Wednesday afternoon, Bob talks to Charlie, the mechanic. “How are you progressing on Miss Alice’s repairs?” Charlie gives Bob a blank look.

“I gave it a quick look yesterday, but I haven’t even started working on her car. I’m still finishing up the work on Mr. Durham’s truck.”

“Haven’t started? We have to get her car working by Friday at noon!” Bob exclaims.

Charlie narrows his eyes and shrugs. “That’s not going to happen. I had to order some parts, and they won’t even be here until tomorrow.”

Bob gives Charlie a pained look and sputters, “surely you realize that Miss Alice is an important customer? She works for a company that has a fleet of leased cars, and they get all their servicing from us. If we don’t have her car ready on time, we could lose that contract!”

Charlie looks back and Bob and replies, “Maybe you should have thought of that earlier. And maybe you should have asked me what my repair schedule looked like before you gave her an ETA on her repairs. Better yet, you probably should have asked Dave, since he’s the shop manager. But, no — you ignored our normal workflow, and now I’m going to have to work overtime because of your mistake. And when this lady gets her car back, if everything works fine, she’ll send you a nice thank you note, and the shop owner will congratulate you. But if I make a mistake in my hurry to meet your unreasonable deadline, you’ll blame me, and the shop owner might fire me. Is that basically right?”

“Yup.”

“I guess I’d better get to work, then.”

Software Australia Buy software online in Australia

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Not a good day

Dougal — Wed, 10 May 2006 17:35:39 +0000

Today, so far, has not been a good day.

Maybe it was an omen when our dog ran away this morning… I opened our front door to let him go out for his “morning consititutional”, but he spotted a rabbit in the yard across the street, and he bolted after it. I chased after him, and came close to getting him to come back, but then he ran off again. We haven’t seen him since. All we can do right now is hope that he either gets hungry and finds his way back home, or that someone friendly will call the phone number on his collar and dog tags.

At work, we were preparing to preview a new web design and process flow for a big customer of ours. I’ve been working on this project for several weeks, including some weekends and evenings. The whole thing has been plagued from the beginning with vague/incomplete project specifications and on-the-fly last-minute changes. But we had managed to get the major features implemented as desired to the point that we were going to dog-and-pony the new site this morning, to be followed by production deployment. Unfortunately, a miscommunication about the timeline for a critical piece of the deployment has caused a snafu in their current production site, which we are still trying to repair.

Bad things often seem to happen in threes. So I’m now wondering what the third bad thing will be.

Is it Friday yet?

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Timing is everything

Dougal — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 14:27:51 +0000

Our group’s management has told us before that if there is any kind of work-related training we’d like to take or conferences we’d like to attend, to let them know. So when An Event Apart Atlanta was announced in January, I put in a request the same day. After not hearing anything for about three weeks, I sent a reminder, and let them know that we could still make the deadline for a $50 discount.

Yesterday, I sent this email:

You know that web conference that I wanted to attend next month?

Nevermind.

http://www.aneventapart.com/news/2006/02/aea_atlanta_sells_out.php

:-/

Grrr.

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Running in place

Dougal — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:13:22 +0000

I’m still here. I’ve just been really busy lately. We’re going through some minor growing pains at my day-job, and it’s kept me really tied up. It’s nothing bad, just that the company is moving from a very loose and informal culture to a slightly more structured one. On the one hand, this means that we can’t have beer in the office anymore. But on the other hand, it means that other groups will quit dumping requests on us developers without any regard to the projects we’re already working on. But during this transition, we’ve gotten a few “gotta-have-yesterday” requests that really do need to be taken care of quickly. I’ve stayed pretty busy working on a few of those.

The weekends have been pretty busy, as well. We just always seem to have something going on. So, there just hasn’t been much time for me to post anything here.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything new to post about, though. Watch this space for new posts soon on topics such as:

Hockey
WordPress 2.0.2
Samsung A-920 phone
Science Projects
Dogs
The WordPress Object Cache API
And various funky interwebnet things

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return(true);

Dougal — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 16:32:50 +0000


function do_stuff() {
  if (in_array($date, $holidays) && $vacation == true) {
    travel('away');
    visit_family();
    $gifts->exchange();
    eat();
    travel('home');
  }

  if ($new_year == true) {
    eat() && drink();
    $weight++;
    $sleep = false;
  }

  $slack = false;
  $resolve++;

  $work->resume();

  return(true);
}

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