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I am pleased to announce the beta release of PHP Time Tracker. A client-server application system for tracking the amount of time required to complete tasks and projects. I am hoping it will help potentially everybody involved in doing work discover how much time it actually takes to do certain tasks so that future estimates can be more accurate. I know that is a problem I currently have, being a relatively new software developer, and I would really like to start to build a baseline for estimating.

There are two main components to the system:

A web-based management interface:

• Allows for the creation of new user accounts, new projects and tasks for those projects
• Will allow for assigning tasks to different users
• Will allow for creating sub-tasks for any task
• Displays a complete log of all the time entries for any task along with user comments

A client-side Windows Forms application:

• Captures an XML feed of all tasks for a user from the web system
• Allows the desktop user to start and stop a timer that will automatically update the time logs on the server
• When a user stops a timer they will have the option to attach a comment to the log update that will be visible through the web interface

So yeah, that’s where I’m at today, the web system is online now at www.power-coder.net/timeTracker. The client application requires a couple of tweaks after some changes I made tonight, so it will be made available for download tomorrow.

Please remember, this is a beta release, it is not by any means ready for production use. I do encourage you to post any feedback you have.

Known Issues:

• Styles don’t work properly in IE (not 100% in firefox either, but much better)
• On pages where there is currently no info in the DB you’ll see a lot of [–someThing–] tags. This is because not all of the queries have been written yet and I have not yet taken an empty result set into account. This will be repaired this week.
• There is absolutely no validation on any of the input. I know, this is bad, no excuse, but it will be repaired this week. Please don’t SQL Inject my database, that wouldn’t be nice!

Please browse through the site, tell me what you like, tell me what you don’t like and what can be improved. That’s the whole purpose for this beta release.

Over the next while there are going to be lots of changes going on to the whole system, I have a huge list of features that I would like to add in, which I will attempt to post as soon as possible. So please don’t be alarmed if things aren’t the way you left them when you sign in after a couple of days.

Thanks for testing it out!

After two full weeks at the new job I’m finally starting to feel like a real developer. I’m being assigned full projects that will have an immediate impact on our current and potential customers. It’s all actually quite exciting and motivating to see features that I build being used live on the web by our customers.

Ok, ok, I know you’ve been asking, the company I am now working for is called GrantStream and we provide web based grant management solutions for corporations. We’ve got an amazing customer list (that I will not list due to contractual agreements) and the people that I work with are very good and helpful. In the past week I’ve prepared an instance of our application for one of the largest companies in North America as well as upgrading the features for many of our other customers.

The drive is a little longer, about 30 minutes down New Street all the way out to Oakville, but I figure I was pretty spoiled with my 12km drive when I was at Steelcar anyway. The office has nice big, bright windows near every desk and the coffee flows all day long. Overall it’s just a comfortable place to work.

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!