Wally

So, I’ve been a full-time developer for a whole week now and I have to say I have really enjoyed the experience so far. It’s been pretty intimidating, I’ve had code running in production systems since my second day. There’s no safety net either, almost all code changes are done on live sites so I have to be very careful that I know what I’m doing before I hit the magic ‘Save’ button.

It’s funny how it works though, now that I am doing PHP at work I find myself much more interested in my home PHP projects as well. I’ve re-vitalized two seperate projects that I had sorta started but never really got anywhere. I just have to be careful not to use any of the proprietary technology that I’ve come into contact with in my new job. Shouldn’t be a huge problem though since my projects are quite different.

I can’t say too much else about the new job just yet, but soon I’ll be able to deliver the full scoop.

Wow, I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s been a lot going on in my life lately. Just before Christmas my girlfriend of 8 years finally moved in with me for good, it’s been great having her around so far, just takes a bit of getting used to not being by myself all the time. Along with our 8 year anniversary, I also turned 25 this past weekend, a milestone I’m told. My girlfriend set up a surprise party with a bunch of my friends, we had a great time but I really didn’t need the bottles of Jager and Goldschlager which made for a messy night on my part. (Thanks for that guys)

Early this year I just hit my first anniversary of full-time employment with my current company, coincidentally on the exact day that I handed in my resignation after accepting a job at a new company. Getting ready for the new job has been pretty demanding too, refreshing my PHP skills and getting my head back into a developer’s mindset instead of the help desk one it’s in now. It’s been tricky but I think I’m really ready. I’ve also solidified my plans to get my .Net certification, although now I am going to do the 2005 track which, unfortunately, most of the training materials for have not been released yet.

My friends tell me that moving to a small company is going to cost me a lot of my free time and that they’ll never see me again. I’m not sure how true that is, but I’m really excited to find out what working in a real development shop is like. Everywhere I’ve worked in the past I’ve been the sole Windows programmer, or even the only tech guy on staff. It’ll be different having others reading through my code and critisizing my ideas. I think it’s going to be a great working and learning experience.

We shall see.

Well, today has been a very interesting day.  I just gave my two-weeks notice to my employer after accepting a job as a full-time Web Application Developer.  It was more difficult than I thought it would be, after all I really enjoyed working with the people in my office.  The reason I decided to leave was because I am an application developer, so working at a help desk for the rest of my career didn’t seem like a great use of my skills. 

The company I’m moving to is definitely going to be much different from the one where I’ve been working for the last year.  The company has about 5% of the employees of my previous employer and a completely opposite culture.  I’m really looking forward to getting started there.  In reality this will be my first time working as a full-time application developer and I’m curious to see how far I can push myself.  Most of my work will involve .Net programming in a Web Services environment, I’m hoping that this will help me with getting my MCAD certification early this spring.

I found the job posted on the Mohawk College Student and Graduate Employment web site, luckily the day I looked was the last day they were accepting applications.  I worked my butt off to get the resume and CV ready and was able to e-mail it to the company at 11:30pm.  The very next day a rep. from the company e-mailed me to arrange a telephone interview.  After that I had an interview with two people from the company, the Director of IT and one of the Co-Owners.  I figured I was doing OK when the interview lasted an hour and 15 minutes, after all, if they weren’t interested in me why would they spend the time to get to know me?  After that I was a little concerned, I didn’t receive a follow-up call by the date they gave me so I started to think they had found somebody else.  Two days later I received another e-mail with an invitiation for an interview with the other Co-Owner.  Apparently this guy was the ‘rubber stamp guy’ for the company and he was there to give his approval.  It was the longest job application/interview process I have experienced so far and I’m very happy with the results.  I would go into more details but I don’t want to mention names of the people or companies involved.  I’m sure you’ve read online about how blogging has affected peoples careers, it’s too soon for me to take that risk. 

So yeah, my last day will the the 13th and from there I’m moving on up. 

Wish me luck!

A couple of weeks ago I happened to stumble onto a treasure chest of insider Microsoft information through something they call Channel9. It’s Microsoft’s attempt to provide some transparency into their development processes and demonstrate some new technologies that will be coming through the pipeline in the future.

Personally I’ve become quite hooked on all the videos they have posted, it’s not all codemonkey stuff either. For example here’s some of the topics that I’ve really been enjoying:

• Windows Vista – All kinds of stuff here, especially since PDC, demos of new features and tech.
• Going Deep – Advanced topics, Vista Transactional File System, Windows Memory Manager Design
• Visual Studio – Neat features and tips for current and future versions of Visual Studio
• Microsoft Partners – Visits to Microsoft partners for demos of new apps and tech.

Most of the videos range in length from 15 minutes to an hour and aren’t just canned press releases, the format is very much ‘in your face’ with the interviewer using an amateur handheld camera in a one-on-one situation with the people directly responsible for the product being featured. I love these videos, especially from a developer point of view, it’s a great opportunity to see how software development is done at a huge corporation like Microsoft. They’re also really cool because I’m now very excited about what I’m going to be able to do when Vista ships next year, both from a user perspective and from a developers. After watching many of these videos I have a greater understanding for why certain things were done they way they were at the Windows architecture level even though it might not have made sense from a user’s perspective.

I strongly recommend any developers, and especially .Net developers, head on over to the site and check out some of the videos. There’s also a fairly active forum commmunity with developers and users from all over the world talking about technology.

Go Channel9 Guy!

Over the weekend I was giving a lot of thought about whether or not I was going to release an application I’m working on as an open-source project. Then I got a little off track thinking about how to monetize the thing if it ended up being of that quality and popularity. Eventually I came to the following point: most open-source software companies charge their customers for customization and support, this led me to the following question:

Is it in the developers best interest to create reliable and stable software when their key source of income is supporting said software?

It’s an interesting paradox, if a software vendor writes an application that is intuitive and easy to use, and also stable and correct, how will they make money if they’re giving it away for free? The ease of use would eliminate most of the need for installation assistance and general operations. Having the software be stable and reliable will reduce the amount of support required for application problems, thus again reducing the vendor’s primary revenue streams.

This makes me wonder if perhaps one of the big things holding back open source is that it is difficult to make money off of well designed and implemented open source software that is easy to use. Maybe I’m way off track here, so please correct me if I am missing any information or if my understanding of the problem is incorrect.