This is an interesting position for me. Before recently, Omega Vortex has just been a small group of close individuals who all knew each other and have worked together before. Now that we’re expanding and I’m having to actually interview and hire people, I’ve been able to experience what it’s like to be on the opposite side of the process. I’m used to being the interviewee or the person applying and sending in a resume, not the guy interviewing or receiving the resume. I don’t claim to be an expert on interviewing people or sifting resumes, but here’s my list of things that’ll immediately get your resume tossed out of the pile. (more…)

I was reading today and came across something that seemed contradictory to what I’ve learned over the years. At the same time, it just made a lot of sense.

Programmers don’t throw away code enough. When faced with a hunk of code someone else wrote, which doesn’t appear to be quite right, or is misbehaving, the proper action is to figure out what it’s supposed to do, and its interface, and then scrap it and start from scratch. (I’m not talking about rewriting whole programs here, just sections.) Instead, people try to handle the corner cases, or hunt down where the leak is. Just stop, think for a little while, get the structure well posed, then write that.

We were bit by this problem at OV recently. Instead of trashing pieces that were there in order to make them work, and writing them based on the original specification, we attempted to bend them into place in order to “save time”. Needless to say, that didn’t work out so well. Not only did we not save time, we used up too much.

Next time, I think it would be more appropriate to go with my gut feeling. Instead of trying to bend the immalleable, we should strive to replace the pieces. Sometimes code is just so bad that it’s not smart, safe, or sane to leave it in place.

I’m certainly losing my sanity, about now.

I think I’m going to change my technology focus. Now that I’ve stepped outside of my circle of really talented and competent people, I’ve learned that PHP Developers suck. I’ve been trying to hire people for a big project that we’re working on, and I am absolutely amazed by the number of unreliable and/or absolutely terrible programmers that I’ve talked to.

PHP is suitable for “enterprise development”. The problem is, only 1% of everyone who knows PHP actually knows what “enterprise development” is supposed to mean.

Maybe this’ll all have a happy ending, but this has so far been pretty close to the top, if not the top, of my list of “Worst Birthdays Ever” …

It’s been a while since I’ve actually posted an update, so I thought it was about time to, since there’s a lull in the chaos here at Planet.

I’m currently half moved in to my cousin’s place, now. I’ll be sharing an apartment with him and his girlfriend for the next year. I love my parents, but I really don’t feel right living at home after being on my own for so long. Once everything gets settled and I can get my desk and stuff up there in my own room, it’ll be a lot better.

I’ve been working at Planet AT&T as a Sales Rep for almost two months, now. Using it as supplementary income to allow me to cut back on consulting work at OV while other projects are in development. It’s a brain-numbingly easy job, but now that I’m living in Jacksonville it’s a bit of a chore to come in to Gadsden to work. Not to mention with gas prices rapidly increasing, it’s starting to get to the point where I don’t make enough to justify the expense of coming here. After my hourly pay goes away in the next week, it’ll get even worse. The job is entirely hit-or-miss commission, and we don’t make a dime off of 95% of the business we do here, bill payments and pre-paid cards. Chances are, I’ll quit soon after the hourly runs out. I found out they use PHP on their intranet, though. I may take a stab at getting a job there doing PHP stuff. We’ll see.

In other news, I’ll be visiting Ruzena in June, so I’m excited about that. By then, it’ll be six months since the last time I’ve seen her, so I’m really looking forward to seeing her again. I’ve missed her a lot. Six months is really too long to go without seeing each other. Hopefully, I can get things together so I’ll be able to move up to that area, within the next couple years. It’ll be nice when I can just go see her whenever I want, instead of having to plan out trips, make sure they’re okay, spend money on tickets, and only get to see her for a week at a time.

As for Omega Vortex, things are moving along steadily. We’re about to start a plan of expansion over the coming months that includes hiring new developers, unveiling new services, and announcing key partnerships and acquisitions. We’ll be announcing and releasing a new product soon, making some changes to our OmegaFlash solution to bring it back under the umbrella and prepare it for Omega Matrix integration, as well as prepare integration points for the rest of our upcoming Educational Suite.

Well, that’s a pretty cumulative update for what’s been going on lately.

Oh, after about only three freaking weeks, I finally have my laptop back … And man is it good to be back on a machine that has more than just 512 MB of (shared — so it doesn’t even come out to that much physical system memory) RAM.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to setup, so I’m cutting this short. Hopefully, Ruzena or I will blog more soon.

The previous entry was Ruzena reacting to my overreacting. Things really aren’t as bad as I made them out to be, to her. It’s just a simple matter of moving with the times. Personally, I really want to continue using PHP. If that’s not what happens, fine. I’ll move forward and do what I have to do to be successful.

I scared her a bit, because I was scared. I didn’t really know what to think about some of the things I was hearing and it freaked me out a little. Of course, I share everything with her, so it scared her too.

One of the things that makes me happy about her entry is the extra emphasis that was given to the fact that we are a team. She and I do things together and we’re always there for each other. We take care of each other and will continue to do so, as time goes on.

Of course, I also like that she’s thinking about the future and considering the family we hope to have and how all of this will have an effect on that, too. But, everything will be okay. Things really aren’t as bad as I thought. It’s just my state of depression, at the time, was amplifying things to make them seem a lot worse than they really were.

Thanks for being there and taking care of me, sweetheart. It really means a lot to me.

… and that’s all I can say about that. For now, anyway. Let it be known that Shaun Shepard is the best Designer I’ve ever met in my life, though.

I’ll scuttle off now, before I say too much.

I got in from the office at about … I think it was sometime around 8:00 PM … this evening and ended up passing out after I finished eating my dinner. Woke up a few hours later, as you can tell. It was a nice nap, but it made me realize how much my body is screaming for relief from the crazy schedule we have at work, right now.

I took a moment to sit here and reflect on how much progress has been made and how much has been done since I came out here almost a year ago. I’m really, quite frankly, astounded with everything …

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I’m really starting to get disappointed in PHP IDEs. Because, I find one that works really well that I love (Zend Studio) but it falls short in respect of two things. The first being the lack of the ability to add support for other source control systems besides CVS and SVN. Second being the lack of built-in support for Unit Testing.

PDT (the Eclipse plugin) is very project-based. It offers up a lot of features that Zend Studio offers, with the added bonus of being built into Eclipse. And Eclipse has a plugin to support the Source Control System we use at work. Eclipse also has a plethora of other very useful plugins, like Aptana. PDT, unfortunately, offers no code inspection support for files outside of projects. That’s a bummer, because I have to jump in and out of various files in various locations that may or may not be apart of any project. So, PDT is missing ZDE staples, but has the benefit of being an Eclipse plugin, meaning I can have my source control integration.

Enter PHPEdit, which I’ve never used, but just learned that it’s going to solve the other problem, in an upcoming version. But not the first. I probably won’t use PHPEdit, except maybe to play around with, but the Unit Testing support is intriguing. If Zend Studio or PDT could get this in, that would be great. If Zend Studio could get this and alternate methods of adding source control support, that would be even better. I’m still waiting to see if PDT will be able to replace Zend Studio or not. Lately, I’ve been using them rather interchangeably, but I’m really wanting to move back to Zend Studio… Time will tell, but I wish these IDE developers would get it together.

So, work has gotten a lot more hectic since I’ve returned from Alabama. As a result, my brain has been rather … scattered. In trying to keep up with all of my obligations at work, I’ve committed yet another disastrous mistake with regards to my financial situation.

I’ve been behind on my car payment, because of lack of cash, and I got called and practically harassed about paying what I owe. Of course, that’s nothing unusual … Everyone wants their money, after all. The mistake was in paying the entire car off completely in bulk when I went to make a payment. That was $700 … and now that the money’s gone, I really need it. Rent is going to be $938.82, this month. That’s granted we can get Shawn’s money transferred over to my account and get a money order from the bank, tomorrow. In all of our running around and my getting pulled over the other day, we didn’t get back in time to make the payment on time, so it was late. And they’ve changed their policy to where they’ll only accept money orders after the rent deadline, which really pisses me off. I could’ve written the check today and put the rest of the money in the bank tomorrow or whenever I could to keep the price of the rent from climbing even higher.

So, tomorrow I’m going to have to get out in really crappy weather conditions (it snowed again today) and drive to the bank to get money from Shawn’s account transferred over and deposit some more cash that we kept out. Also keep in mind that I still have no tags on my car, and my license hasn’t been renewed yet. So, if we get pulled over a second time, I doubt the officer in question is going to be as friendly as last time.

BUT! That money will be just enough to cover the rent. We still won’t have enough to cover the other … oh, approximately $350 worth of other bills that have to be paid this month. Shawn and I are both already broke, and it’s only the freaking 5th. We’ve still got a whole month to go through. And I didn’t spend any of my money, in Alabama, except for a little bit to eat here and there.

We’ll survive though. The important thing is that we get the rent paid so we don’t get kicked out of the apartment. The rest of the bills I can fend off until next month, when nobody is getting any of my money, except for rent, groceries, and bills. Everyone else can kiss off, because I don’t have the energy to waste on you people, any longer. Just leave me alone.

Moral of the story? Don’t succumb to pressure from people that “want their money” … I’ve got to survive too, you know. Next time something like this happens, I’m telling them to take a freaking number, because there’s plenty of other people wanting to get at my check book.