I’m going to put something else up in this webspace (jeremyprivett.com) which will probably be better than a blog. My goal is to aggregate all of my web presence into a single feed and present it here, as well as details on projects I’m working on and what I’m doing on the work-side of life, be it with Highwinds (as much as I can reveal, anyway), Omega Vortex, or otherwise.

Thanks to all of you who followed along and kept me company while I was actually doing this. You all can find me on other places on the net, if you want. I’m @jeremyprivett on Twitter. I still hang out on Anfiniti and it’s pretty easy to find me on Facebook.

At the beginning of October, I got a chance to go visit Ruzena again. As always, we had a really good time. I was in Houghton for Homecoming and got to be there for all of the festivities, including the Homecoming Banquet and Dance. I think the food was better last year, but it was still good. The dance didn’t quite go “as planned.” The first half was kind of lame, so we ended up migrating to the basement where a group of us had our own little mini-dance, which was far more entertaining. Ruzena and I got to watch our first fireworks show together and became “siamese twins” because we were huddled so closely together because of how cold it was outside.

Omega Vortex has been feeling the situation with the economy with potential clients bailing, citing economic problems. I’ve taken this as an opportunity to look for another job, and I believe things are looking good on that front. I’ve received extremely positive responses, but a few details are still being worked out, so I won’t say more than that for fear of jinxing things. Omega Vortex isn’t closing, we’re just going to be cutting back like any other company does, during a recession. We’re closing extraneous divisions in an effort to concentrate more on our core business. Because of this, we’ve closed the website temporarily because it was only up to facilitate some of the divisions we’re closing. This is giving us an opportunity to go through with our redesign plan and get a new look in place for the re-launch. We’ll have more news on that front sometime soon.

I’ve been doing a lot more gaming again, lately. I’ve given some thought to cross-posting some game reviews on this blog and the blog at Anfiniti. I’m not exactly up-to-date with the latest games and would also be doing some retro-reviews, so my current hitlist consists of Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty: World at War, Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge, and a few other things. In case I’ve never mentioned it before, I’m always interested in playing games with new people. You can find me on Xbox Live, Xfire, and Steam. For Xbox Live: Atrophius, for Xfire: atrophius, and for Steam: siguel. Maybe I’ll have a PSN name or a Wii Friend Code to share, sometime in the not too distant future.

Things have been extraordinarily dull, lately. I should be moving to Phoenix soon, so I think I’ll start taking opportunities to get out more and explore. I think I’m missing out on a world of inspiration because I rarely leave my desk. Maybe hanging out with Dutch again will get me back on my feet and moving forward. After almost two years of living with or around people that actually do what I do and are willing and capable of having ideas and such bounced off of them, I think my creativity started to die off when I lost that immediate access to people like me. Programming and all of the processes surrounding programming and software development is exciting to me, except when it’s not. When I don’t have people that I can talk to about it pretty frequently, I usually end up resorting to more reading than coding to try and make up for that lack of interaction. Hopefully, being in a new work environment will help.

That’s about all, for now. If I stop letting myself be lazy or distracted, I’ll blog more. Maybe even about interesting things. We’ll just have to see …

Not Including Basic Information

Like, for one, your name. I had a resume show up in my inbox the other day that didn’t have a name to go with it. So, I figured I could get the name out of the resume itself in order to respond. I couldn’t find the person’s name to save my life. It’s really not smart to send in a resume without basic contact details so I can get in touch with you. If you don’t include something as basic as your name, I’m going to feel dumb trying to contact you without knowing it. The likelihood of me contacting you if I feel dumb about it? Pretty low. To the tune of 0%.

Not Knowing the Basics (Or Lying)

I got a “spectacular” resume from someone who had (claimed to have) been working in this industry for 10+ years. Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from a very prestigious college and a laundry list of work experience that went on for a few pages …

First of all, I don’t need a seven page resume. That sets off some alarms in my head when I open up a huge document that’s supposed to be a resume. You’re either full of yourself or lying. I don’t need to know where you were working in 1991 if it isn’t one of your three or four most recent jobs. For this particular person, I’m inclined to say that they were lying. Against my better judgement, I decided to interview.

As part of my interview process, I like to ask some really basic questions. I do this for two reasons. One, it relieves tension. People like to get things right. As they get more things right, they become more comfortable and we can move on to more complicated concepts. For two, I know to stop the interview immediately if the person misses any of these questions … This particular person happened to miss all but two of my questions. These questions are some that my younger programming buddies who are still in High School would laugh at this person for not being able to answer. How can you have 10 years of experience and not know dead-simple concepts?

Massive Font to Extend an Otherwise Short Resume

Please, please don’t try to hide the fact that in Arial 12pt your resume is only 1 page. I just finished looking through a resume whose font was literally set to 23pt. That’s huge! And quite unnecessary. I’m not measuring to see who has the longest, but if your font is so big that I can only fit less than 1/8 of what would be the first page on my screen, I’m probably just going to delete it.

Not Knowing English

First off, don’t take this the wrong way. I’m a fan of equal opportunity, but you’ve got to meet our requirements. One of our requirements is “an excellent command of written and spoken English”. I’d just as quickly trash a resume from an white American man as I would from anyone else for not meeting that requirement.

Telling Me Too Much

Piggy backing somewhat on one of the other points, don’t tell me too much. If I’m looking for a PHP/MySQL developer, I want to know how much experience you have in those two things and maybe some other closely-related technologies. I don’t want to know or care to know about how much experience you have in Adobe Photoshop, MS Access, ILE RPG, CL400/CLLE, etc. Yes, all of those were from an actual resume. I don’t care. Don’t tell me all that crap, it’s not related to the position you’re applying for.

Lying by Omission

Or, concealing the fact that you don’t have a college degree by using phrases like “Attended X university”. Again, I don’t care, but don’t try to make me believe something by covering it up. People drop out of college all the time for various different reasons. Just couldn’t cut it? Ran out of money? Decide college wasn’t for you? That’s your business. I’m still in college. I haven’t finished my Bachelor’s, yet. I’m really not going to hold that against you. Some of the best programmers I know don’t have college degrees. Some of the worst programmers I know do. Interesting demographic. I’m more of a believer in cold, hard experience.

Telling Me Sensitive Information

If I’m not allowed to ask, I don’t want to know at least until I give you a yay or a nay. Don’t tell me your gender (if it’s obvious, I’ll figure it out), don’t tell me your sexual orientation, don’t tell me your age, etc. If you put that kind of crap on your resume, that puts employers in a bad position, because we’re not allowed to make decisions based on that information. That requires us to consciously ignore it. If it’s there, I’m not even going to bother. It’s not because you’re white, black, asian, mexican, 85, 13, gay, bi, married, divorce, have 37 kids, a woman, or a paraplegic. It’s because I don’t want to touch something that could put me in a bad position, because you gave me information that I’m not allowed to judge you on. So, I’m just not going to judge you at all and act like I never saw your resume.

Not Attaching your Resume

This is a good one. I’ve excused it a couple times and contacted people to have them send it to me, but I’m slowly starting to not give it a second thought. Make sure you’re thorough enough to remember to actually attach your resume to an e-mail when you send it off.

That’s just a few things. As I come across more, I’ll probably post a part two. You never know what people are going to do, after all …

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’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.

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

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.

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

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 …

But, there’s a downside to that progress. We’ve known pretty much nothing but the job for a while, now. For a few months, in the beginning, I wasn’t too fond of this concept. I’m 19 and I wanted my life back. A few things that have happened to me since the end of October have changed my attitude substantially.

First, I realized the real potential behind everything we’re doing. This project is huge. And I know I’m speaking in abstracts here, but all will be cleared up before too long.

Second, outside influences from certain people, especially fellow team members, have inspired me to do better than I have been in the past.

Finally, a very special person came into my life through what couldn’t possibly have been a coincidental meeting. And after everything that’s happened since that moment, I know that it’s no longer just my future and well-being that I’m working for.

On my birthday this year, I will have been doing this stuff for seven years. Man, it’s been a long time … but … not really? Yes, not really. For six years, exactly, I was involved in Open Source / Free Software-type development, for the most part. I don’t think anyone realizes that the difference between that type of development and working for a real company, and going through the entire software development process (as opposed to just the parts you feel like doing) is really an entirely different game. And for this reason, 95% of open source and free software type projects will ultimately fail.

I mean, really. Think about it very clearly for a moment, before you respond with your usual “not thinking about the whole picture” backlash attitude. Open source development is, 9 times out of 10, inspired by what could be frankly categorized as an egotistical attitude based around improving something for personal gain. Sure, you’re giving what you’ve done to the community. Sharing is good, after all. Your mother taught you to share with your friends. Excellent.

There’s this attitude and mentality shared by these types of developers that just doesn’t fit inside the realm of “Enterprise Software Development”. And you WILL get your chops busted for it. Trust me, I have gone and am still going through it to this day. You hang onto to these things and no one is going to trust your ability to get things done, whether or not you truly have the ability to do so.

I’ve been keeping an eye very carefully on the PHP Community in its entirety for a long time. I’m in a position where at any moment I may have to justify the business reasons behind using PHP over other languages like Ruby (shoot me), or anything .NET based. After watching as carefully as I have for the time I have now, I’m quite ashamed to say that I don’t have an answer to the question. And it’s for the very reason I mentioned above. There are far too many people that are prominent in the PHP Community that have that egotistical attitude that comes with Open Source development. Watching these people constantly attack and belittle each other instead of working hard to make PHP the mainstay enterprise language that they want it to be absolutely saddens me.

I’ve been getting my feet wet in .NET land again lately, and comparing C# directly to PHP, you get a lot of interesting results. First off, C# is a compiled language where PHP is interpreted. PHP applications, by their very nature, can be deployed faster than your ASP/C#.NET apps. I know this from token experience from my job, especially. C# is strongly typed, PHP is loosely typed. This is probably a subject of debate, but I’ve oftentimes found myself coding my PHP apps to be rather strongly typed. Variables should be this type and this type only. Anything else is wrong. So, being able to just explicitly state that in C# makes things easier, believe it or not. The only time this becomes a problem is when you need to do any kind of type juggling, which is insanely easy to do in PHP because it takes care of it for you, in the background.

Next on my list is overloading. Specifically, class method overloading. PHP-enthusiasts gripe because PHP “has no method overloading” — Uhh, I think you’re missing the concept of what overloading is, folks. PHP supports overloading in one very major way that makes it “easier” — Variable arguments. You can set default argument values in the function definition. This very feature alone satisfies 95% of the overloading needs I’ve ever had. And with PHP being a loosely typed language, the return value is already completely based on the type of the variable you return. Now, it doesn’t support operator overloading of any kind, though.

One feature that PHP lacks that constantly and consistently pains me is namespaces. For the love of all that is good in this world, will the PHP developers please get off their asses and realize that if they want to go in any kind of OO direction with this language (and if they want to get the some 3000+ functions out of the global namespace) that namespacing is an absolute MUST HAVE?

Wow … Talk about side-tracked. Anyway …

The first quarter of this year slipped by me almost completely without notice. And I’m happy to say that the period of constant “do or die” work is almost over. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and judging from how far we’ve come and how well our team has managed to pull through even some of the most trying situations, things are looking very good. You may not hear from me again until May, but I’ll have a huge update to post after I get back from New York, I’m sure.

Until then …

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.