catching up

Wow, I thought the last post was a long time in coming. More than three years since that entry. 

Once again my intentions are to start posting more regularly, but who knows how that will go. 

Lots of changes again. Moved to Jersey to work for a startup for a couple of years (I think this killed my intention to keep up with posts). Then left there to work in NYC. Spent the last year mostly working as a consultant for a small company on-site at Bloomberg. 

Working for the startup in Jersey was an interesting experience. I had the opportunity to build my own team. I helped the company grow from locations in five countries to just under thirty, before I left. I moved their hosting to AWS and standardized their deployment processes. I helped them move most of their development in-house, then moved it overseas to a team in Hungary, and got to go to Budapest to help get that started. There was so much going on that I could probably write several posts just about my time there, and I may write up some of them in the future.  While I was there I spent way too much time working; 70 hours a week was not unusual, and there were several weeks that broke 90. Then I got to watch everything I had built pretty much implode over a six month period. That part wasn't fun at all. 

After that, NYC. I've wanted to live and work in NYC since I visited it in the late 90's. So now I'm living in the East Village and working a short subway ride away. I'm currently acting as a senior Rails developer, and consulting at Bloomberg (I don't work for Bloomberg, but am on site as a contractor in their government sector). For large corporate work it's a pretty good position, but I don't think I can ever be passionate about working for a large corporation. There's just too many things that I don't like about the environments of larger corporations, and I dont' think it's something that's going to change.  

So I'm going to try and use the blog as a space for my less technical writings. I will probably also be writing some more technical posts, but they will most likely be posted on my company's blog instead of here (I'll be sure and post a link though). 

Until next time (hopefully it won't bee too long this time). 

I'm such a bad blogger

I seem to never really keep up with these things. It's been almost a year since I posted, and wow how things have changed. It was financially one of the worst years I've ever had, but everything else is working out great. I've got some of the best friends anyone can ask for. My relationship is great (which I wasn't really even in at the time of the last post). My Ruby skills have gotten so much better. I have a great social life. Everything except for a steady job.

Which leads me to my next thing. I'm looking for a regular position. I've been freelancing for the last three years and it's just not paying the bills. I've got such a wide skill set that it's really hard to peg down what I actually do. I've been a Systems Administration, a professional programmer, a DBA, and an IT Director. Lately I've worked mostly with Ruby on Rails, but I've kept up with the other skills too. If anyone has any leads I'm looking.

Dating

It's been a long time since I was actually dating, and that it was really different then. I had such a different idea about how it was supposed to be (really a little warped), and such a small group to pick from. I was really lucky to find who I did even if it didn't work out in the end.

I've always been really picky about who I spend my time with, and really haven't dated that many people, and for the first time I'm actually splitting my time between multiple women. They all know I'm not really in the right place now for a real relationship, but it's still fun. Still it's a bit of a juggling act to find time in my schedule. I have to keep the career as a priority (I really love my job). I've also got several side projects that keep wanting my attention, and all of them have the potential to be really lucrative. I'm making music a priority, it's one of the few things that makes me really happy. I've also got the friends that want some of my time. Luckily the insomnia is working to my advantage in this. When you only sleep for a couple of hours a night it gives you a lot more time for everything.

I do think I'm finally settling into the single life. I'm loving my new freedom, and starting to realize just what I had been missing. There is still a part of me that wants someone to share it with, but right now the compromises I'd have to make just make it not worth it.

So tonight it off to a LARP, then a night club. Tomorrow I'll spend some time with friends, and make a little music. Sunday is a date at the zoo. Somewhere in there I also have to spend some time working on a data mismatching bug in an import script. And, this is a light schedule.

Looking for community input on a development methodology issue.

I'm running into a development methodology issue and hope to solicit some advice from the developer community. We've got a fairly large Joomla site, several custom modules, and a lot of third party modules. Several developers are working on the code in a distributed environment. Each developer has their own local development install. We have a staging environment that mirrors the productions environment. We're using Git for source control and have no problems with the migration of code from one environment to another. Where we keep running into issues is with the DB changes.

With our custom modules the problem isn't as pronounced. We simply require an installation SQL script to be in each component and run this script when the component is installed in a new environment. We're even working on making this automated, and may adopt some of the RoR migration file methodology. Third party components on the other hand are a pain. It's nice to be able to just add functionality by installing a component, but every time we do we end up spending a lot of time tearing the component apart to find all the DB changes it does on install. We then take these changes and make a script in the same way as we do for our custom components.

So far this is the best methodology we've come up with. Anyone have any incite on a better way? I'd like to automate the build process as much as possible. We're doing continuous integration, but it breaks down when we have db changes. Is there a db comparison too out there that would allow us to compare a Development DB with the Staging DB, and would generate the SQL script? It would have to work with MySQL.

I need an assistant.

The amount of work I have just keeps growing. We spent several hours yesterday laying out the plan for the next six months for just one of the sites we're working on. At the end we decided it's time to hire a Jr. programmer to help out. So if there's any PHP programmers that want to work in what is probably the best environment I've ever worked, you need to contact me.

This crazy white board drawing is the plan for just one of the sites we're working on. There are at least three more, and possibly seven. We're using Joomla as a base (there's also a couple of RoR apps for support), but there's a lot of customization for each site. We're streaming video from Wowza on EC2, having to pull from several legacy databases, building a server cluster that can handle a tremendous amount of traffic, and generally having a great time doing it. It's a small team (and will stay that way), the hours are pretty flexible (I usually work from home at least one day a week), and the people are a lot of fun to be around.

If you're interested send a resume to bcatherall at theanimenetwork.com.

Loving my work.

I've got to say that, especially with everything else that has been going on, I'm really enjoying my work right now. For those of you who don't know I'm currently working on contract the ADV. More specifically for Anime Network. I've been rebuilding their website (it's needed a rebuild for a while now). Their current site is pretty much a mess, and had too many people work on it over the years with no real cohesive plan. I'm converting it to a Joomla driven site, with several custom plugins to handle their Anime specific data. The goal is to allow them to edit their content easily and still maintain a stable/fast site. It's a lot of work, but there also a lot of fun in it.

Luckily they just hired Robin Cannon to do the site design and layout so I can concentrate on the architecture and development. I only met Robin about a month ago, but his skill set was a great match to mine, and getting him hired was fairly easy. Currently we're looking at having an internal alpha of the site done next week. Then (as long as we stay on track) we should have a public beta around the 1st of December, with the site going live around the first of the year.

This is definitely one of the best places I've worked at. The people are great, the environment is laid back, and they actually want to accomplish something. After year working in Education this is a wonderful change. That I get to work with Anime is just a nice bonus.

Music

I forgot how much I loved music. I played in a band while in High School. We weren't, but the party lifestyle tore us apart. I kinda took a brake from the scene, and just never really returned. Now I have time again. I've dusted off the guitars, and am practicing regularly again. I'm really rusty but it's coming back. If I keep this up, I'm either going to have to join or start another band. I'll just have to make sure it's one that doesn't take itself too seriously. I've always missed the rush from playing live music with others. There's really nothing quite like it.