Starting late on Monday carried over to a late night on Tuesday at work. It was an unexpected, but overall beneficial long day. I’ve managed to squeeze in a little time for refactoring the JavaScript portion of awFlickr app, which I plan to release into a private beta this weekend.
I’ll think of a better name once I get it out for testing. I’m planning on using this as a base for Spiral’s PHP version, and my tentatively named aw:Mail.
I picked up two books the other night to read for work & my personal projects. While looking for Design Patterns Explained I found PHP Design Patterns, which is a WROX book (I favor this publisher) and seemed to be the same core content in a shorter package. The other is the O’Reilly JavaScript Pocket Reference, which is going to be a bit of a refresher.
This past weekend I started working on a Flickr app that’s REST/JSON/JavaScript based (with a PHP back end generating the JSON). It’s a very old project I never really got started on, but was pretty easy to (almost) complete in under 2 days.
I discovered… a Flickr ID is too large for any web browser JavaScript engine to handle; they rounded up randomly. HTML comments on photos are very annoying from a programmatic point of view. I really like JavaScript.
I used the code base from my portfolio and hacked it up, by taking out the # operations and using events on all the dynamic objects/elements. I also corrected the JSON transportation. Now I’m left with a few visual effects to create, and some misc behavioral changes.
I’m hoping to have v1.0 released this week under the MIT license.
With the new employment at Maple Works Technology, working on Spiral has become very low priority due to other projects and having a fiance. I’m hoping to have a spring beta.
So today was the first day I submitted a bug fix on the project at work. It was a pretty simple sanitize situation, but it raised some project alarms which I can’t really get into. Regardless, I ended up submitting to the wrong branch and had to rollback the change (sad face). Doing this via console was a new experience for me, because I’ve never used Mercurial for my own projects and didn’t realize a commit without a comment would open an editor window to write in [which I escaped]; causing a lock. Removing the lock took a minute, and was a first for our team.
I’ve also spent a little time documenting the “how to” information in our wiki, which is also a first for me. I’m finding that syntax interesting and not very descriptive when writing it. Oh well.
Next week should be more productive, and I’m looking forward to it.
Yesterday was a bit of an adventure. I arrived at work before anyone else, but I didn’t have a key or number code to get in so I ended up waiting for someone else to arrive. Eventually a team member arrived and I was shown the facilities, and got a coffee. The day went by relatively quickly with some paper work, a meeting and some testing on a QA machine for the project (to familiarize myself with the web app).
Overall I like the place. The various programmers seem like nice guys, and the management is easy to talk with. I’m looking forward to getting the next iteration of my project complete and anything else I’ll be working on; the projects seem varied and interesting.
It’s a complete 180 from my last long term job.
Prior to Christmas I had a pretty long interview at Maple Works. I thought it went well, considering I hadn’t eaten anything that day and was peer reviewed for approximately 2.5hr about code, best practices, etc. I made a few mistakes with answers, which I felt would hurt my chances of getting the job so I offered SVN access to code in an effort to prove what I couldn’t communicate verbally (that day) wasn’t an indication of quality or experience.
It worked out.
Yesterday I received an official job offer, and I’m extremely excited to start next week. I haven’t felt this good about a job in a very long time (not counting my recent DND contract, that was a good experience).
I was less than impressed with the way my previous long-term client/contract responded to a reference check; replying they didn’t have the “10-15 minutes to write an email”. Thanks guys. I gave you 8 years (10 total on the project), and you can’t spend a few minutes replying to simple questions about my work ethic. The more time passes, the happier I am that I’ve moved on from that job and sorted out my career path with a clear end goal that seems more attainable every month.
Other than that small hiccup, things went forward and I couldn’t be happier.
It was an interesting experience, mostly because I was always reacting instead of being proactive. The entire ceremony was in french, and I have a vary basic understanding of the language. What a stressful hour and a half! Overall the photos look great considering the rooms we had to work with, but I have blinking in some pictures that I didn’t catch yesterday on the camera’s lcd screen.
I’m going to see if I can make magic happen with Photoshop once I’m done processing the RAWs into TIFFs for the final work flow.
I was hired on an hourly basis, so I felt that I was obligated to get as many common “wedding” photos as possible that were applicable even though I went over my bank of time by nearly an hour. I’m going to blame the hotel room lighting and design on that issue. I spent nearly 20 minutes going through various light setups, trying to find something that’d light the room up how I wanted without causing reflections in nearly every surface in frame. It was stressful! The lack of time meant imperfection was likely, which is not something I want to give to a client.
I’m budgeting about 2-3hr on post processing today, with delivery of the final product tomorrow; just before we leave for Jamaica and my first destination wedding!
With Christmas having come and gone, and New Years just around the corner; development has slowed to a crawl on Spiral due to a lack of time for this project. It should pick up again in January, after I return from Jamaica where I’m shooting a wedding.
I’m hoping to have a beta up and running on the in-house dev server soon!
I’m using it for the first time with Spiral, and it’s slowing down my planned rapid development cycle. It’s definitely worth learning, and I’m sure it’s going to be worth while based on Spiral’s schema. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of CUD (CRUD?) though, because it complicates things and complains about FK relations sometimes.