transplanted
06.08.09
status update
Two years after I began with Power to Change, my contract came to a close. During the following month I did a few hours work for Global Aid Network, hiked The Chief, read some fiction, attended a nice dinner with Shirley and friends, and of course began looking for work.
The job I landed actually came via a status update on Facebook. A previous manager was looking to hire and saw that I was looking for work. Not only that, I found help driving a moving truck through the mountains, and a place to rent, all via my Facebook status.
Who knew Facebook could actually be useful?
yardstick
The company I’ve been working for this past month goes by a few names, the latest being Yardstick Software. Our business is web based training and testing for business.
Our current platform is written on Adobe ColdFusion 8 and Microsoft SQL Server, while we build a new platform with a responsive Web 2.0 interface and a less-is-more mantra. For that, we’re using Open Source tools like Ruby on Rails, Haml, jQuery, and Git.
The guys have designed a very slick interface thus far. We even have a Psychometrician on staff to help analyze and improve the quality of the exams. Very cool stuff.
In terms of actual work, my first project is a database migration from another LMS. My recent T-SQL work for Global Aid Network and IT’s Donor Studio implementation has served me well. It will be another two weeks before I will be diving back into Rails.
I’m also getting better at Foosball, though still not a big scorer.
periphery
With so much technology to keep up with in Rails-land, I’m trying to narrow my focus. That means I won’t be spending time on interests like: Python, Django, Objective-C, Cocoa, ActionScript, Flash, functional languages, or game design.
The two books I’m reading are The Well-Grounded Rubyist and Pragmatic Version Control Using Git. I really like David Black’s book, which works through all the nitty gritty details of Ruby 1.9.
home on the web
For a while now I have been thinking about the future of nathany.com. Let’s face it, the graphics are a little dated, what, with Palm Pilot icons. The layout is based on yesterday’s screen resolutions, and I’ve been using Georgia for body copy since 2001. More importantly, I’ve been asking myself questions about the kind of content my web site should contain.
- Will it mostly cover who I am and what I’m doing? Or will I try to provide genuinely helpful tips, book reviews, and the like?
- Will I write everything geek-focused based on my career and expertise, or include a broader spectrum of interests and personal experience?
- Should I continue with lengthy articles, or incorporate more microblogging?
- To what extent should I link to, integrate, or incorporate equivalent functionality of third-party sites like Flikr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Delicious?
I’ve concluded that I should spin off niche blogs for each programming topic, and make nathany.com a launch pad to those blogs and my activity elsewhere on the web.
The four year-old content will be going away. I’m not even sure what I wrote that long ago. Instead, I intend to have only a few articles that I revise over time: an auto-biography, testimony, and resumé. Just enough to get the gist of who I am.
It won’t be a blog in itself, it won’t be gloss and gradients, and it won’t be anytime soon.