RosemaryLong.com

It’s no secret that strategizing, designing, implementing an online presence for one’s self is about a gazillion times more difficult than for clients, even for those who strategize, design, and dream-implement in their sleep. A few weeks ago, Comrade’s site went live, and taking a proper modern web approach, it is constantly growing and evolving.

While it’s always advantageous to understand more about a client and spend some time with them to get a proper feel for their industry, doing a project for one’s own brand involves taking a step back. We live and breathe what we do everyday, how do we abstract ourselves so that others can understand us. I admit that these are the same challenges that I felt over the years as rosemarylong.com (nee rosemarysanchez.com) constantly felt like an unfinished project.

Luckily, having driven team members with strong vision and a diverse array of talents helped devise our company’s online expression, constructively asking the question “why are we doing it this way?”.

And yes, spending time on *that* site made me feel a bit guilty enough to post new content on *this* site. Plus I can point out that my name is in the news section for the Big Rock snow that I did, whee!

Big Rock Untapped allows artists to contribute music for release as a compilation album, promoting independent artists and local bands. I was tasked to find a way to download the music files (hundreds of them) and scoffed at the idea of manually downloading each of them. I considered using PHP to grab the files, but then remembered about wget which my old colleague used to pull the Weather Network current temperature for Fairmont Hot Springs Resort. After a bit of searching, I found Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s wget for Mac OS X which was a very helpful pre-compiled for OSX version of the binary and off I went. With the wget manual at my disposal, I was able to download the scores of files all in one go, definitely making my life easier (and preventing future cringing the next time I have to do this pull).

This reinforces the feeling I had in first year Computer Science: the joy of making computers do my bidding. Mwahaha!

I was reading a very-relevant-to-right-now article on pmstories.com and came across this quiz to find out what kind of programmer I am. This is also one of those too long to tweet things, so I upgraded to a blog post about it. Yey.

Your programmer personality type is:

PHTC

You’re a Planner.
You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

I used to be one of those developers that thought that in order to really call oneself a programmer, one must be able to program something from line 0. My training in University involved learning some low-level programming languages that taught us the importance of processing speed and memory allocation. In my mind it followed, then, that in order to make something good one must put all one’s discipline starting from low-level knowledge up to software engineering theory to code a product properly. This might have been good in said institutional days when every hour spent was willfully given in the name of education, but as I’m older and have more things to tend to surrounding my regular work hours, I’ve slowly emerged from this way of thinking.

It would be an exercise of modularity and reusability if I made something from scratch and then repurposed it for different projects.

Then for freelance projects I considered setting up a simple CMS like WordPress for clients with a nice template that they could edit their own pages.

I took this further and saved time in design by starting with one of those free-to-$50 predesigned templates.

In the past two weeks at work, I had been terrorized by the knowledge that we would have to quickly turnaround a multi-user custom-content website, and I racked my brain for a shortcut that would let us deliver the site in a month and a half as required. My first instincts included using Drupal, but the learning curve might be too steep to climb in such a short period of time. Next, WordPress MU which I am already familiar with. Sure it handles the multi-user bit, but how do I wrangle the idea of submitting posts to a blog into something actually usable for this particular project.

Then one night I found what could be the perfect solution: PhpMembers is a pre-built user management system that allows me to pile on as many custom-built pages as I want. It sounds like a happy medium as I don’t have to do the boring crap of doing user authentication and management and “oh boo hoo hoo I forgot my password” stuff, and instead I can focus on the cool parts.

In my head I was thinking of a way to express how the tedious stuff being eliminated allows more time for finesse of execution of the more important parts of the project. “Why reinvent the wheel when you can just find one and sex it up?” No, that doesn’t work, especially since I picture a stone torus with a prominent hole shape. For now, in my head I’m imagining that I’m just taking a pre-existing wheel and throwing glitter on it to pretty it up. I wonder if there’s a product or tool out there that can help me with my analogies.

I can’t believe it’s already been three weeks since I started at Comrade. It’s been a whirlwind, but the busy-ness and energy and focus at the company is invigorating. In my first week I pushed out a website, a push page (HTML email template), did some Flash updates, and a couple of estimates. Adding to that list, since I started:

• Two more push pages for different clients
• Half a website (functionality client demo, next week is making it look sexy)
• Another half-website for a different client (lots of multitasking here)
• Plans for our company site redesign (no, it’s not a common thing, but I’ve had involvement in redesigns for Critical Mass, Applied Communications, and now Comrade as well)

Culture-wise, I’ve discovered several other areas of a good fit:

• Communal oatmeal (I love oatmeal)
• During my tour I noticed a couple of bottles of unopened gin. Today while looking for peanut butter I found some vodka, and this afternoon I was shown the beer fridge.
• There is a Dreamcast, Wii, and Neo Geo in our lounge. We have DDR dance pads and Rock Band guitars and drums downstairs.
• The company summer event includes an overnight stay at Kicking Horse, BBQ and rafting, but the part that makes me the most proud is a day’s worth of volunteering at the Mustard Seed.
• Shared Japanese snacks!
• Fun with action figures (I’ve been reassured that HR policies are pretty lenient and I can be my usual NSFW self. Won’t do it right away though.)
• Everyone’s friendliness, honesty, willingness to collaborate, and drive to push out great work. We had a brainstorming session and it was inspiring and good-kind-challenging to hear aspirations of getting a Webby.

I’m even getting used to the tiny spoons that make me feel like an ogre whenever I use them!

Some vice triggers that I’m making a list right here to avoid overdoing include:

• Starbucks everywhere! When they open a DeVille across the street I’m going to have to exercise my strongest discipline.
• Manuel Latruwe and Bernard Callebaut also in walking distance.
• Aforementioned bottles of my preferred spirits.
• Sushi a block away too! They have amazing lunch specials for $9.50 or $10.50 and the food is really fresh and artfully prepared.

All in all, I really feel at home in my new position already. With our lunches out, outing to see Star Trek, and close-quartered collaborative work style it sometimes surprises me that it hasn’t even been a full month yet. Here’s to another two weeks of great work before I go to Australia to visit Ash and come back forgetting how to do simple tasks such as remembering my name.