For Hire
Despite sometimes major butchering of English grammar, I think this blog covers that I am at least competent and well versed in software development. That said, for US citizens I’m willing to pay out a $500 bounty for anyone who can point me in the direction of a Python contract or full time remote position that I get placed into.
contact me at fromthewordress at ominian dot net or dot com.
Philosophy on getting it done
I think a few times now I’ve lamented my experiences with PHP. I’ve been accused by a few people of being two-faced in this regards; openly saying I don’t want to work with PHP any more as a tool set while when faced with a client seeking my advice on what platform to use I have pointed them towards PHP. The truth is really simple, I want to get my client up and going or back on the road. Sure Ruby on rails or Django are superior products in many ways but they are also more expensive in professional resources to maintain. A good example is one of my clients that is the IT department for a major corporation with tens of thousands of customers and just as many computers to maintain. My client is well versed in system administration but not in software engineering. So I wrote up a Kohana v3 application that uses mod_php and jquery. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow they will still be alright and happy.
I don’t think I’m explaining myself too well just yet, so a much better written tale from the industy is in order via the DailyWTF @ ( article ). Yes PHP is not sexy, its almost downright ugly, but it does what the client needs and is mostly reliable in that regard. If tomorrow someone said they needed an asyncronous event handler and they wanted it in PHP5; I’d probably laugh in their face then proceed to start crying when I realized they were serious. Still, if tomorrow someone said they needed a simple low-traffic inventory management system and they already have on hand people competent in LAMP then I’d lean towards PHP.
Why I’m like this, going for the simplest most reliable solution originates with some of my more desperate past clients.
The super website constructor… of doom
Directory websites are usually fairly simple MVC applications that parse browser get requests and dump out a nice simple web structure on demand. This client’s system did all of that work upfront by ingesting a hierarchical data structure and generated a root page, regional pages, sub-pages, and detail pages in one go into a static 4.7GB structure. The plus was that the sales/marketing people could make rudimentary hand changes to pages and they would work… but the MAJOR downside was that structural changes were not possible.
The complexity required to build such a builder was unbelievable and as such was not very future safe. In fact it was generator 1-2 GigaBytes of error/warning messages a day to syslog. In reflection I think the project was built the way it was because of two reasons: first was my predecessors lack of experience/knowledge and secondly more so was from sheer boredom. They made this because it was challenging to implement. Once implemented and the stack went into a maintain and feature addition state, they left.
I hate PHP so I shall do something else.
Another client horror story was a scenario where the company Rockstar got bored with the languages currently in use. Having read an extensive amount of this Rockstar’s code I could clearly see they were a very brilliant individual but at the same time they were shooting their client in the foot with their perpetual need to be brilliant. I would often lament in private conversation with my peers that Rockstar while brilliant always leaned towards the path less taken, making code that was harder to maintain or sometimes understand without a long analysis period.
The final straw for this rock star was when they started writing backend services in a language no one else in the company knew. I think the grand total was half a mega-byte of code that was super critical to the company, very pretty, but also seriously fragile. As expected, the Rock star grew bored and moved on. A few months later it was a somewhat horrifying moment when one of these almost forgetton gems broke under unexpected circumstances and brought an entire application array of 30 servers to a dead stop. The culprit was a UTF-8 character that broke a high volume data extraction script and caused the producer to block, waiting for the stdout pipe to clear up some space.
Fixing that took all of the King’s men, some of the horses, the company CTO, and me. I won’t go into specifics but it turned out to be a combination of weak code and a bug in the target language.
Summary
I don’t resent these people for getting bored; more so I resent that they got bored and didn’t realize it until they had abused an unspoken trust between professional and employer. Code monkeys write code to make their client money, not to entertain themselves. Whenever I get bored I will go on a serendipity hike with my personnel time to see what I can pull off, ultimately a lot of these pet projects
end of going no where… but it’s more about the journey then the destination for me. Each one of my pet’s has ended up teaching me more about things I might not work with professionally then any book or blog post could. Just because you are a professional and work in your vocation doesn’t mean you are going to wake up one day and be a master in that profession, just like martial arts and any other vocation professional or hobby, it takes continual investment of time and energy, striving for harder and more unusual problems to solve to become a master.
