Job

I said in my previous post that a lot can happen in 2 years.

In that time span I've:

• Moved to using a MacBook and OSX.

  • OSX being very BSD-like makes it an prime target for web development. It isn't the second class citizen Windows is in the Ruby or Node.js communities.

• Transitioned away from .NET and don't really miss it. I do randomly play around with .NET core when possible but I haven't actually built anything with it.

  • This was honestly very huge at the time but I still feel I made the right decision. Though Windows 10 is the platform Windows 8 should have been and likely would've kept me on board.
• Transitioned to PHP and web technologies full bore. I'm no fan of the PHP language but in the era of Visual Studio 2012, a dynamic language that only required refreshing my browser was much faster than waiting on the compile cycle.

• Drank the vagrant koolaid via PuPHPet.

  • Recreating production hardware isn't too difficult with my ancient DevOps experience.
  • Waiting on the painful commit/push/wait for deployment/refresh cycle to see a change was a huge productivity destroyer.
  • Even developing locally when production PHP versions aren't consistent can be a nightmare. Something like rvm in Ruby comes close but it isn't perfect.
• Immediately took to PHPStorm as my IDE of choice. JetBrains have done an amazing job and if you've used ReSharper you've only had a taste. I'm no fan of Java but I'll make a concession for tools this good.
• Wrote a very crude front-end only CMS. When working in only HTML, CSS, and Javascript you really see the separation of client and server very clearly.

• I jumped in the deep end with tools like gulp, bower and yeoman.

  • This has fueled my desire to be a lot more fluent in Node.js.
  • Frontend development becomes insanely fun because a lot of the tedium melts away if you do it right.
  • This gulp template was extended from this blog post and it's subsequent repository to streamline working on the custom CMS.
  • This yeoman gulp generator looks a little more promising as it seems to serve a similar purpose but feels like less work.
• I have a Microsoft Lumia 640 and the Windows 10 Mobile OS is one of the best mobile experiences I've used to date. I know I'm biased but it has shaped up really well.
• My personal laptop is running Windows 10 as well so I haven't abandoned the Windows ecosystem by a long shot, I've just become more of a consumer rather than a developer.

That's really only scratching the surface. It would've been helpful to have blog posts as I moved along but as with most things, life got in the way.

My main goal for the early part of 2016 is to revamp this site and make it the playground I was looking for in 2013. Octopress is really nice but if I upgrade to v3 it's not much more work to migrating away to something like Hexo, Metalsmith, or DocPad.

I promise I haven't been intentionally neglecting you, Mr. Blog.

A lot has changed since the last time I posted here. I basically got laid off from a position in IT working for my dad's company at Omega HR Solutions, Inc. I transitioned into a career path I chosen in college: software development. It was rather fortunate that I had been doing a lot of work in .NET throughout the 10+ years of working for them to produce relatively usable code.

My current position is with Swerdlin & Company officially as "Software Developer" until a cooler title can be coined. Normally, I usually keep a low profile regarding my employment primarily due to negativity I tend to generate regarding some of the work I've done in the past. I think that behavior is going to change dramatically. Why? Well even the worst most annoying task I can be assigned is an exciting challenge and it isn't every day I can say that.

Even though my dataset is limited, Swerdlin is the greatest company I've ever worked for. We have an annual Dog Day in June, "Giant cupcake day" (STARS) roughly every 1-2 months, and I'm given a great deal of professional and creative freedom. I'm typing this on my laptop that I'm allowed to bring in every so often to work on personal projects. My boss' reaction to asking was "If you're working on a personal project, what you learn is directly transferable" to paraphrase a bit. Amazingly cool.

I'm hoping that with this post I'll start a renewed desire to post more but I might be starting more music related posts. Part of me doesn't want to considering "music blogs" are a considerate portion of the online community map but perhaps I can find something to make it unique. Initially I hope to post reviews of some of my favorite bands latest works or critiques of the more recent concerts I've been to.

Here's a partial list of what's coming:

1. My friend Andrew's band V. Caldera played a "badass" show (their terms) at The Vinyl on September 25th.
2. Avenged Sevenfold's latest album Nightmare is insanely awesome.
3. Ditto for Atreyu's Congregation of the Damned despite it being out for nearly a year before I heard of it.

I also plan on actually writing music so my hope is to also use this blog to flesh out ideas and various universes characters can play in. My intention is to create moods using (hopefully) complete backstories in some ways like how Coheed & Cambria work but not directly. I suppose only time will tell if the idea is useful or useless.