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.

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.

Lets just go through last years list and see how it matches up.

digg.com – gosh. I can’t believe how much I actually loved that site. I use Reddit now, and would never dream of going back to digg.

WordPress – Meh. I don’t use it so much these days. It’s still something I use (obviously), but more and more rarely.

Google Talk – It’s only my Android, and people talk to me sometimes on there, but I don’t use it these days. Back into MSN!

Youtube – I use this more these days, thanks to 4oD being on there.

last.fm – I still store my plays on there, but I use Spotify to listen to music now.

4chan – What the hell? Not been there in years.

Google Reader – I’m using Fever now!

Google Notebook – this got retired. I mostly just use actual physical notebooks now. If there’s a link I want to jot down, I bitly it first.

Almost everything has changed then really. I didn’t think my habits had changed as much. Here’s this years list:

• Fever – it’s just so much more beautiful and personal than Google Reader. I guess I like controlling it on my own server.
• Google Listen – for podcasts on my Android
• Spotify – I’m a premium member, I like it so much.
• Steam – I really like having electronic copies of games. I’m not so bothered about physical media.
• World Of Warcraft – it’s a phase, I’m sure.
• Facebook – of course.
• Reddit

It’s odd to see how many of my favourite things are all paid for now. I’m not sure if paying for something is a thing that people do as they get older, or if I just feel better about paying.

I’ve switched to a new theme too, which is freaking amazing. Not just the front end, but the back end is so comprehensive. There’s a few changes and little bugs I’ve noticed already, but I’ll fix them and send them back to the author when I get a few minutes.

// 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.

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.

Could be an interesting weekend project.

I think the definite biggest hit to today’s motivation was not getting up on time. It just pushed everything back a few hours, and once your schedule is kicked off course by that much you tend to think “meh, what’s another hour later going to change?” Getting up on time is tomorrows aim in that case. It seems so petty, and childish though. Some people have to get up at four am to get to work on time. My sometimes getting up to eleven o’clock is just horrible.

It would be better if there was some kind of motivation. A website with a Lost input-the-number-every-108-minutes type function. Not every 108 minutes, but rather every morning, before 0830 (and then again at 0900 to make sure you’re actually up). I might do that right now…

There needs to be some kind of reward at the end though. I’m not too sure what that could be. It can’t cost me any money, but must somehow give that minireward feeling that I get from WoW…

Oh, achievements!

This wasn’t going to be a post for my Idea A Day, but I guess I’ll make it so. A website in which you get achievements for things that are to the betterment of your life. “Get up everyday for two weeks before nine am.” (Described above.) “Go camping in the Lake District.” (Tracked by GPS.) “Be sociable! Spend more than an hour in six different places in a week.” (GPS again.)

I’m sure there are others. They don’t have to be provable always; although there’s a tiny competitive part to it, I just like collecting achievements.

Since I ended up playing World of Warcraft this weekend (ugh), I didn’t get much done on it. I’m planning on adding to it during this week though, and releasing the code once it’s in a releasable state.

This ore mine has six thousand tonnes of ore, and once that’s all been mined, it’ll make no more.

Mobs are “born” at the beginning of the world, Creationist styles, and they can mate and produce more. But once they’re all killed, that’s that species extinct. Maybe a talent tree could lead to taming some pets, as fighters, or as live stock where they can be bred. Environmentalists might spring up, protecting habitats of animals.

Players can build things in each sector of land, but they never truly own it. It can be taken away by force just like it can be in real life. Maybe a guild of players will get paid in exchange for defending the land?

There wouldn’t be any leveling, per say. The aim would just be to earn as much as you can, gain as much land as you can. Become King? Or maybe a democracy could happen.

Player death should mean something. Something extreme. Both to inspire people to live, and also to not take life away. When the stakes are high, a person will be less likely to go and attack people randomly just to be a dick. If they stand to die, and lose all their stats, money, items, and property maybe they’ll think twice.

It’ll be a cool experiment in social politics, in a world where your property actually means something. If you lose your unique Amulet of +10 Health, you can’t just go and do another rinse and repeat quest. That was the only one in the game.