Shane's blog

I’m going to bed. I’ve not proof read this. Expect gibberish.

For almost two months now I’ve been working as an actual full time, professional web developer (“lead” developer, actually). I’ve started my placement year with BEA Solutions, which is effectively my first full time job.

From a student freelancer’s probably ten hour a week schedule, my life is now 35 hours at least a week spent at work. That’s a bit of a culture shock. Concentrating for seven hours a day with a twenty minute break (which I rarely leave my seat for) isn’t something I’ve done for years – in fact even in school it was only six hours with an hour and half break. Not only concentrating for so long, but sometimes on one single thing for hours at a time. If nothing, it sometimes gets dull.

It’s also hard to avoid distractions. Facebook is only one “control+t fb” away since I’m usually working in a browser. Its far too easy to lose five minutes each time the impulse arises. Usually I can catch myself before I do it and think “just work another forty minutes and then you can check”, but it’s just muscle memory and habit now.

Also, there’s now people around me as I work. Before, when freelancing, I could just go to the library, or lock myself up in my room, mostly isolated. But now there’s Andrew and Marc sitting right opposite me starting a conversation is all too easy. And not just conversations either, they have weird quirks that are just distracting.

I suppose these are the types of things that you have to get used to when you become a worker bee.

My main project at the moment is a customer control panel that we sell to businesses to help them manage their customers, e-commerce, websites, and maybe telephony soon. I’m rewriting the current system to make it a little more robust and modifiable.

To give it that flexibility, I’ve made sure it focuses object orientated design which is actually really nice. It has a whole different feel to procedural PHP I’ve done in the past, and so feels less samey. I’ve never really had to seriously make sure that my code is easy to understand before either. My stuff has always been legible, but sometimes a little too sprawled out to understand quickly. Now working in a business where I’ll be leaving in a year and someone else will take over my job, I need to make sure that everything I write is clear and well commented. It’s actually nice to see really well formatted documentation for methods (I’m using javadoc notation).

As interesting as working on the control panel is, if all you do is eat pizza – as interesting as it is – you quickly get bored of it. Fortunately there always seems to be some other little thing I can be getting on with after getting bored and needing a break from it. I don’t see myself not having any work to do in the future.

Talking to customers over the phone was definitely something I was not looking forwards to. If my northern accent wasn’t bad another around these parts, I just naturally speak fast anyway. I was worried for no reason though, really. I’ve not had problems at all in that area, other than the odd bit of nervousness. I’m still a little bit under confident in what I’m supposed to be saying sometimes though, or at least worried that someone will phone with a question I can’t answer as tactically as Andrew or Marc can. That’s to be expected though; they’ve been doing this much longer than two months.

Overall the work part of my life is going fairly well, and I’m quite happy with it.

It’s too hot to sleep, and since I have an awful memory, maybe I should start documenting my life more thoroughly. If nothing than for me to look back in a year and think “gosh, I really had an easy life back then; I wish I knew it”.

I have a boyfriend these days. It’s going pretty well, other than the occasional worried “do I really want to be with someone who I will barely get to see?” thoughts. After all, Jacob’s from Redditch which is two train rides and about two hours away from Leicester. When I’m in Portsmouth it’ll be about £40 and five hour train journey. Irck.

Fortunately though I’ve become a pretty solitary guy, and having someone around me full time is just exhausting. Once in a while is more than enough really. I’m not sure he’ll be able to handle it as much though. We’ll figure something out.

I just got back from his to find that my bed room window was left open and so my room was flooded; the mattress is soaked, and the floor is too. A part of the window sill below is really damp, and likely to just fall away at any time. Hopefully it’ll all dry up before I leave though, and I won’t lose any of my deposit. I don’t blame them if they decide to dock me any though.

Seriously. I hate writing applications that consist entirely of

// get result set with mysql_query
//  check if there are any results
     //  loop through each result
          //  output its data
//  no results?
     //  output message saying so

Once you’ve mastered that you can get hundreds of freelance jobs and securely say you have the prerequisite skills. It’s just so dull after writing it a hundred thousand times. Oh, that and

//  has this form field been set?
     //  yes, update database

That’s everything. I want something more interesting. I expect this is why Rails was made because someone got sick of doing this.

So I sucked at keeping An Idea A Day going. I mostly got distracted by other things, and also I think have a good select of ideas that can keep me busy for a while. Maybe it’s best to have a short-list of good ideas, than hundreds that I’ll never find time for. At the moment I’m mostly working on my freelance management site at the moment, and a few bits of client work.

I’m reading ReWork at the moment, which is a business book that seems really agile (in the methodology sense). It’s really smart, and says things that I know will upset a lot of people. Saying things like “planning is guessing” flies in the face of everything I learnt when I was studying business. In fact, that entire course was about making product proposals based on project figures, which people like David Heinemeier Hansson (whose really become a hero of mine over the last few weeks) would say are completely useless.

The 37signals guys do genuinely seem to believe that everyone can achieve what they have though. I agree with them most of the time. But they talk about there being a million to one chance of the next start-up being a Google, or a Facebook, and they don’t really realise that they’re a Google, they’re a Facebook. They’re certainly making enough money to be up in those ranks. They talk about having freedom like anyone can have it, but it’s easy to trust your employees with a credit card for expenses or possibly piss of a customer when you’re already earning millions of dollars a month. You don’t have those liberties as a new business who should be cherishing their customers, not telling them that they’re idiots. (Saying that, I love the “Let your customers outgrow you” essay.)

Reading the book has mostly gotten me excited about being the little guy, again. It talks about all the silver linings, like being able to entirely change my business model in one day, and being able to make mistakes whilst there aren’t millions of customers watching me. Being small means I’m restricted to keeping things simple, which is a key stepping stone to a good application, apparently.

I’m also reading a book on Marx, just to get the views that are opposing mine.

The first thing I’ve realised is that people are really susceptible to opinions. Reading this book I’m coming across ideas that really make me rethink my ideas (even if they don’t change my opinions). It throws out simple phrases like “property is theft”. It barely explains what it means, so you’re left to think about it yourself. If it had been explained, I would have read that paragraph and carried on, but I had to stop and think “what do they mean by this?” It’s a pretty strong way to win someone over, once you have them thinking their own ideas up.

“Property is theft” has really struck a chord with me though. What gives you the right to own the land that your home is on? What gives oil companies the right to take the Earth’s resources and sell them as their own? It’s not fair that the richest man takes the most. An arbitrary currency does not entitle anyone to a finite resource which belongs to me by birth right as much as it does you.

I still strongly believe in my argument against that ideology — you’re entitled to what you earn — but it’s interesting nonetheless to think about these things.