All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

While working at RCS (see Jobs, Jobs, & More Jobs - Part 1) one of the projects I ended up working on was trying to figure out a way to upload streaming video to Amazon's S3. Googling around I found several articles, but only about 3 different PHP implementations for S3 - all 3 used at least 1 PEAR library. After wasting half a day trying to find something that didn't use PEAR I started a conversation with the lead programmer. What he said revealed a lot.

St Joseph, Mo, Take 2, HJB, beginning of December to beginning of January -

I finally found another job that would give me the excuse to get away from the previous job. The consulting agency that had found me the job down in Tulsa had found something for me up in St Joseph, about 1.5 hours north of Kansas City. They gave me the url for the website and I wasn't sure if they were for real.

I wanted to be sure of what they wanted. It looked liked Ma & Pa had done it themselves, hired a nephew to do it, or something similar. It looked like a business reject site from the mid-90's back when nobody had any idea what they were doing. I was wondering if they handled enough business to even be able to pay me and if they were able to pay, would they?

I was told that they realized that their site was not what it needed to be and needed a complete redesign. They had a bunch of different websites and all of them needed work. They needed somebody to completely take over their websites - they wanted a webmaster. At that point I was willing to talk with them. On the 1 hand I was kind of excited to be completely in charge and on the other hand I was kind of worried.

Back in September of last year I wrote a post about my job hunt in No More Vegas and an ending note about the jobs in Kansas City. Where else to start except at the beginning (of the end?). To protect the names of the innocent (and the not so innocent) I won't mention any names.

Downtown Kansas City, Take 1, RCS, beginning of October to end of November -

I ended up with a job in Kansas City at a marketing agency I'll call RCS. It had started years ago as a print media company and as the internet blossomed it started adding web sites to it's list of offerings. The business started at about 66%/33% print/internet and now they're about 66%/33% internet/print - their business has completely shifted. Their initial web offerings was limited to static web pages, later they outsourced dynamic pages to a ColdFusion developer, & finally they ended up with their own in house development staff.

When I went through the interview process I asked certain questions. Maybe I didn't ask the right people the correct questions because after I got started I found a completely different picture than what I had thought had been painted during the interview process. I had asked about LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), source code versioning (subversion, cvs, etc), development cycle, OOP, a framework or at the very least a library of code, and several other things. It sounded like it was a good match - they did inform me though that they did have two Windows servers which were required for the legacy ColdFusion and ASP code. I figured no problem, I won't have to deal with those unless I have to mess with some of the ColdFusion or ASP code. I especially thought this was a good match not only because the lead developer programmer/server admin liked Gentoo (even his desktop was running Gentoo) and disliked Windows, but the long-time owner of the marketing company was a Mac person and very anti-Microsoft (she also owned the Mac store down the hall which is also certified to do Mac repairs!)

And then it all came crumbling down...

This latest job is quite the mess. I'll probably elaborate later, but for now I've been having issues with Eclipse. I've not been able to get it to start & actually work... it just sits there all day at the splash screen eating up about 45% cpu as it sleeps.

Well phooey.

Tuesday I ended up calling the consulting agencies that had contacted me about Las Vegas & Oklahoma City & neither had good news.

The agency with the Las Vegas job said that Las Vegas had decided to go a different route. I'm not sure if that means that they decided to outsource, just turn the jobs down, or just wait until they figured out what space they were going to have in the new building. The guy that gave me a tour of the building said if he did get somebody he wasn't sure where he'd put them as he really didn't have any space right then.

The other possibility is that they simply weren't impressed - I was tired from the long days before hand & I hadn't had any caffiene yet. My programming ability didn't impress me much except that I remembered a bit of SQL & I've not done much at all with a database or SQL (other than simple SELECT queries).

Several times when they asked technical questions I wasn't really quite sure what it was they were referring to. Then again, how much can you say until you give the answer away?

I don't remember how exactly the guy phrased his question, but after I asked what he was refering to I discovered that he was referring to the visibility of class methods & members. PHP 5 recognizes 'public', 'private', & 'protected'.

I've had a busy week & hopefully I'll get to sleep in tomorrow :)

Since my last project ended Aug 31 due to lack of funding I figured I'd come & fix a couple of my parents' computer issues, including setting up the new file server. While in Kansas City I got several emails & phone calls about a couple of job offers.

Monday I had barely left KC before I had to stop & wait for a phone interview with River City Studios (here in KC). After that I finished heading back down to Tulsa & spent the night.

I ran into an issue in IE a couple months back & I've seen a couple of other people mention they're having the same issue. It's something that once you've solved in a project you usually don't think about it again... at least until you run into the problem again in a different project.

Way back in April I made a post about the IDEs I've been stuck with at work - Dreamweaver 8 & PHPEdit. I ended up using Dreamweaver, but remained frustrated with several issues.

In May at the Tulsa PHP User Group meeting, somebody showed off EasyEclipse and mentioned how easy it was to get it working. I ended up downloading & installing the EasyEclipse for LAMP to see what it was like.

Or why I almost didn't get my questions answered...

Last week thursday I was told that if I found another project to go ahead & take it. For those that need interpretation that means - if I find a job elsewhere, go for it... no need for 2 weeks notice. At least I'm still showing up in the morning, leaving in the evening, & getting paid so the project hasn't reached a, Please pack up your stuff & leave, point.

This info has been around for a while, but I thought I'd post it so I wouldn't have to go hunting for the info again.

Rename files with capital letters in the filename to all lowercase -