Is it a bad thing if I’m a software engineer (that’s my title anyway) and I can’t stand C? I’m working through the Tome of the language (K&R), and jeez, it’s just ugly. In order to achieve Geek First Class, do you have to know C?
Category: development
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So, the spur-of-the-moment redesign is
So, the spur-of-the-moment redesign is done on one page… what do you think?
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I am The Norm. The
I am The Norm. The Norm is me. I consider it a point of pride that I keep my inbox empty at all times and deal with mail as it comes in. I don’t know why everyone can’t do that. I walk by my friends’ desks and they have an unconquerable mountain of mail. How do they live with themselves?
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The webcam is coming, kiddies.
The webcam is coming, kiddies. Be forewarned. My fat (currently fuzzy) face will soon be plastered all over the site. Yay for webcams! Maybe I’ll go start up camboys or something and become a web celebrity or something. mmmmmmmmm, celebrity.
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Profile
You can tell everything you want to know about him from the way walks: short clipped fast steps, his heels pounding the floor with a slap. He wears the corporate casual wardrobe like a uniform. His khaki Dockers pressed to a crease in the front, his oxford shirts in several solid muted colors, afraid to show any personality. It’s the same thing every day of the week. He is completely ordinary in every way, except one. He’s compensated for a complete lack of charisma and talent with longevity. He is where is he is because he’s stuck around, moving to management when the technology surpassed him and he couldn’t keep up. He knows the words, and tries to pepper his audience with them, hoping they won’t ask him to explain what any of them mean. He knows his days of walking his zip-zip heel slapping way through the halls are numbered and tries to look busy by inventing projects with important names. To justify his salary, he must keep busy. He must keep track of numbers, whether they mean anything or not. The spreadsheets and reports pile up, highlighted in a pastel rainbow according to a indiscernable color code. He is the bane of our existence. He stays while those who do real work drop like flies around us, caught in “budget cuts” and “restructuring”. We whisper and point and wonder, why not him? He does nothing. He makes more than three of our former colleagues combined. We sit, we wonder, we seethe.
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Spending Time in QA
At work, I deal with our QA (it stands for Quality Assurance for the unitiated) group almost daily. When I make changes to any of our search products, I have to give the QA folks the code and then fix any bugs they find before it can go into production.
The QA process is weird. I work with the same two people all the time, and we have a rhythm. If the changes are fairly minor, we work on just that until it’s done. The problem is it’s like playing tennis with a medicine ball. I send the code over, they look at it, do their tests, send me a list of problems, I fix them and the process begins again. When we’re really moving, I can’t work on anything else. It’s hard to switch gears fast enough to remember what line of code does what and where to find the code to fix whatever bug’s been reported. So, I spend a good part of the process trying not to think about anything else. I do a lot of blog surfing, looking for new sites to read. It’s a weird feeling, reading but trying not to get too into it so I can react quickly to the latest list of bugs that could show up at any time.
That’s what I’m doing today. Until my QA-Buddy clears my latest Opus to the Search Gods, I’m writing (which is distracting me) and surfing. Yes, boss, I’m working! I’m QA-ing!! I swear!
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ems and ens and things.
ems and ens and things. I had no idea.
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My A-List O’ Bloggers
Dave’s post about the “A-List” got me thinking about the blogs I read that really fall into my own private list. I started out with the people Dave listed, but I’ve since moved on to other people. I think it’s mostly because most of the A-Listers that I read don’t update often enough. So, here’s the KP-List:
- Open Brackets: She’s twitterpated and is probably the best writer among all the blogs I frequent. She can break your heart in a paragraph.
- OddFellow: He has a son a who’s a little older than Max and lives in Texas. His writing always rings true, and a lot of it makes me laugh. He’s the kind of guy I’d hang out with if he lived down the street.
- Jodi: She gets bitten by the “woe-is-me” bug sometimes, but when she’s on, it’s fun to watch. Funny observations about single life in Minnesota.
- Bluishorange: She’s a college student in Texas. She paints a window into a world I don’t know, never knew, and am fascinated by. If she weren’t such a good writer, it would be just another blog, but she’s good, very good.
- The Norm: I know, I know, it’s a comic strip. But, it feels like a blog. Again, it rings true, which is a must-have. Oh, and funny. I like funny.
That’s it. That’s my A-List. I wanted to keep it short. There are a lot of people I left out that I read daily. But, these guys are the ones I check frequently. Is there one thing that sets them apart? Looking over my descriptions, my list is filled with people who are good writers who write the truth. Whether it’s fiction or not, it rings true. They offer a window into their lives and don’t shy away from painful topics. I hope they keep it up.
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Freedom!!
Nine days. I have nine days off in a row. I don’t believe it. It’s too good to be true. I have a terrible feeling that I won’t get to take all nine off because something will break at work, someone will need me to rescue them from either their own incompetance or implement somethin that will make somebody a whole lot of money.
Every time I’ve tried to take a vacation this year, I’ve had to move something around. I have to go back to work, do something and mess up our plans. Please, not this week.
I like what I do. I’m good at it. Whenever I look at where I am, I think back to my interview for this job over two years ago. The guy interviewing me asked what I wanted to be doing in six months. I said I wanted to be the go-to guy. I want to be the guy people come to when something needs doing. I’m that guy. Then he asked what I wanted to be doing in 5 years. I said I wanted to be running a big site like Amazon (yeah, shoot for the moon). Well, it’s almost three years later and I’m the only production guy on one of the most-used search engines on the web. There’s a whole team for the backend. A whole team that keeps it up and running. I am the only guy who works on the frontend and middleware pieces. And now, I’ve got a dozen other search projects that I’m the only frontend guy on. I guess I’m running a collection of sites that gets (I think) more hits than Amazon on any given day. How crazy is that? How messed up is the world that I’m the only guy for these projects?
You know, this stuff is bad for my ego. It’s made me arrogant. I’m trying not to be, I swear I am. I know I’m in the position I’m in because my group has made some really bad decisions over the years, letting the wrong people get away, while replacing them with people with little-to-no talent or imagination. That means that they make up for the lack of talent in most by overworking those that have some. That’s also the way they lose good people. It’s a vicious cycle, and now the economics of everything mean we’re not hiring. So, it will be this way for the foreseeable future. What a downer…
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I only got a 36
I only got a 36 on the Blogaholic quiz. Maybe that’s why no one comes here (well, other than the gigantic black hole where the content should be).