Recently in programming Category

I am tasked daily with very challenging things.  Often times more challenging than I believe I can take care of at the time.  The fact of the matter is, I *have* to figure out a way to get the task done.  Either that, or someone else will, and I'm all of the sudden out of a job.  I also have to keep up on the latest technologies, not because it's required, but because it's smart, and gives me an edge in the field.  Combine this with school, $life, and kung fu, and you have a very formidable task ahead of you.  This is where I make a comparison between kung fu and my career (though green it and myself may be), further proved by me writing this at 4am on a school night.  This is not the first time I have had to sacrifice sleep to get a mission critical piece of work done.  And this will not be the last.  One's mental strength and make up must be that which can withstand the tribulations of mind numbingly bad code, test iterations that seem endless, and the 800lb gorilla on your back that is sleep deprivation.  

Anyway, this rant is pretty much done.  I just really had to convey the fact that mental clarity and strength in one form or another is absolutely pinnacle if you really want to be a competitive, well, anything.

I'm two semesters away from being done with college.  Probably forever, unless I get hired at a place that wants me to get some sort of master's program in software engineering.  Which, I personally feel would hurt me as the industry moves to fast to stop and go back to school, but i digress.  Anyway, I'm also holding down a few contracts doing web programming and system admin to certain degrees respectively.  I'm working around 30 hours a week, and going to school, 16 credits.  I'm at maximum capacity, and have very little room forever.  But I love it.  I could really do without school, but I know that once it's over, it's OVER, and that shiny little certificate will make a world of difference in many many places.  

I really stress out over things not getting done, not meeting expectations, and of course deadlines.  I've found that in order to keep any semblance of sanity, my scheduling, triage, and delegation skills must be performing at an absolute peak, and pristine condition at all times.  I am a perfectionist, and even more so a control freak.  I've extremely OCD, and I have battled demons concerning letting things go that are out of my control for ages.  I feel however, that no matter how stressful, I am truly blessed for these opportunities.  People have trusted me enough to give me money (and good money at that, especially for a college student) to do work on their systems, their bread and butter.  A daunting task, yes, but I know I have the hutzpah, know how, and tenacity to get this stuff done.  And done well. 

So I know this is a bit of a rant.  I know this is stereotypical life-blogging.  However I feel it is important to get this information out in the public, as I feel having insight into someone's life can really help give you a gauge as to what kind of quality work they will produce, etc.  Also, it's nice to bitch!

Take care all.  I look forward to the day I get to look back on all this and go, "Ahhhh. Full time job, no school, place to live, beer in fridge, I'm happy."

I'm looking forward to see what kinds of talks get accepted, and how things pan out.

More later, surely.

Enjoy!

It seemed to really take a lot out of me going up there, damn S.A.D.  However I'm back in town (Denver) and things have mostly settled back into place.  I've got a lot of work to catch up on, but the MogileFS stuff has been good to me and dfw has made good progress in tandem with soon-to-be-released-into-the-wild Form::Sensible::Reflector::DBIC.  I have some nitpicks with Form::Sensible I will be talking to Senor Kuri about but they are very minor.  Also, Catalyst::Controller::REST has provided me with an excellent resource as of late to create a REST side of my API for dfw.  This in turn has given me a lot of ideas on writing a general API class depending on how much different I need to be from Catalyst::Controller::DBIC::API::REST.  Regardless it's been a fun learning experience.  In fact, it will help me have a nice layer to do things like nperez has been working on with ExtJS and the aforementioned class.

*ANOTHER* thing enqueued is my Solr search for all of this stuff.  Once I get my schema laid out properly, I think the indexing and searching will be a dream as Catalyst::Model::WebService::Solr does a good bit of the work for you (as well as DBIx::Class::Indexer::WebService::Solr).  

Very soon I will have codes to share, and a more coherent blog post. 

I thought the talks went very well, although I feel I was a bit too nervous during mine.  I survived though, and the slides are online.  Of course, the best part was the gokarts with Jay Shirley and Cory Watson was fucking awesome.  I wasn't aware that a PIT maneuver was possible using a gokart.

I learned a lot, Florida was as I said beautiful, and the entertainment was great.  I'll definitely be attending next year.

Next: School!