:Dread Pirate PJ’s House of Hacks and Tricks

I’m flying to NYC this afternoon, for a lunch / interview Thursday. The company interviewing me has been in business for nearly 15 years, with Linux and BSD, Perl and Interchange as their platform (Interchange is a Perl-based e-commerce platform.) They want to build a Ruby on Rails e-commerce platform to support their customers for the next 15 years.

They’ve been in touch with me for the last six weeks. I have had 4 phone interviews with them. This is the final face-to-face interview in their hiring process. If all goes well during and after lunch and we still like each other, they’ll be a job contract to sign when all is said and done.

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After the interview, I will have the rest of the week and weekend to spend as I like. I’ll be staying in Southeastern Pennsylvania with my friend the sci-fi author, her husband and twin 3 year old girls. I will visit other friends and family in SE PA over the weekend. It will be great to see them again. Last I saw them was in August of 2005.

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It’s been six weeks with the racing-oriented Ruby on Rails custom CMS. The past two weeks have been kind of slow work wise. There’s been very little overtime compared to the first four weeks of the project. Since I last wrote about the project here, I’ve done some on-the-job learning about RJS and the Prototype JavaScript library, and about Capistrano and deploying on Apache clusters.

In these past two weeks, there were short bursts of frantic bug squashing in between quiet hours of chit chat in the project’s Campfire group chat and on Skype. It was difficult to stay awake some evenings, when there was nothing to do but chat, and wait for the customer to QA the latest release.

Speaking of release, the client finally wants to go live, on Monday, April 2nd. This Monday evening, the code was deployed to the live Apache and MySQL cluster where the application will live out its public life.

Just in time for the Malaysian Gran Prix next weekend, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, software.development

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I finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.1, with the now famous 2.1.2 codebase (famous among WP users, I guess.)

And the asshat spammer is still trying to beat Akismet, with 428 more comment spam since the original 376, for a total of 704 between 9 am on March 16 and now, 8:28 pm on Thursday March 22. He is losing, because even if he makes it through Akismet (which he is not, not in the slightest), he is going to end up in my moderation queue, and I’ll flag his trash as spam.

As a famous Texan governor asshat already said earlier this decade: Bring it on!

Technorati Tags:
upgrades, wordpress, akismet

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Between 9 am March 16, and noon March 17, some asshat decided to attack my site with 376 comment spam. All but one got through, and it made it into my moderation queue. I promptly marked it as spam.

Thanks to the Akismet guys, for a job well done!

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wordpress, akismet

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I survived the crazy work schedule and lack of sleep from my recent gig. I know there are still a few outstanding bugs, less than 5, but they are not critical. They are so non-critical, our employer is giving us Friday off, and there’s no more overtime until perhaps well into phase 2, which starts later this month.

The Rails app I have been working on should be up already, but it’s out of our hands now. The customer is tasked with deploying it, not us. The first race of the F1 championship starts Sunday March 18. If the site goes up after that, it’s gonna lose impact. But that’s not my responsibility.

I want to show it off already. It’s been a crazy four weeks, and the site looks and runs great. I had nothing to do with the visual aspects. I’m a Rails code monkey, not a graphic designer by any means. Our web designer did a great job on the CMS and press/journalist access site, along with the Flash guys’ tremendous job on the Flash client on the consumer site.

Before this project, I had only worked on Rails with another Rails newcomer, for just six months last summer. But in this project I am working with a few Rails experts. One of them is even a Rails open source contributor. And I learned just how much I didn’t know. I am humbled and acknowledge I am just a junior Rails developer.

So I’m back to the books for more knowledge. I meant to do that earlier, but the overtime kept me away. Since I have the weekend off, I’m gonna study some more Rails stuff, like RJS and RESTful web services.

(Aside: You know you’re a real geek when you have the weekend off from working in front of a computer, and your time off consists of sitting in front of a computer, studying about work-related stuff.)

Also, I’ve already started writing a post about using embedded Ruby templates and ActiveRecord within command-line Ruby scripts. This can be useful to generate templated emails, XML feeds, and all kinds of other formatted output from cron jobs and the like using Ruby. I’m sure that will be of interest to quite a few Ruby fans.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna use my free Thursday evening to begin to catch up on some teevee and anime I’ve had to let accumulate in my BitTorrent folder in the last four weeks. I also look forward to IMing with friends tonight for more than a few sentences, without having to divide my attention between work chat discussions and my friends’ conversations.

Talk to you again soon!

Technorati Tags:
software.development, rails, ruby

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It’s been two and a half weeks since I started my most recent freelancing software development project. Two and a half weeks of 20 hour days and seven day work weeks. Yep, if this project were to end today, I could weather out the rest of the year before another project came along. I wasn’t born a fool and took advantage of the overtime for precisely this reason. I have aged a year in only three weeks, busting my ass into a nubbin’, but with this in my résumé, this is promising to be the wonderful start of a great year.

This project is huge both in scope and publicity, for our customer and for Rails. And we go live after Monday, March 12! There is still work after that, but next week, you all will get to know what I was working on! That’s cool! I’ve been dying to tell you. In some countries, this is as big as NASCAR.

The project backend is in Rails, and like most systems, it has a data entry component and an end user component. In this project, one data entry system feeds two end user components with more or less the same data, but styled and delivered differently. As I mentioned two weeks ago, this is a project about car racing, and as in any sport, the press and the consumer both need different levels of access to information about the race cars, the racers, and the race information itself.

One of the coolest aspect of this project is working with delivery from the Rails side, of Atom feeds to a Flash client. The Flash client is slick enough, as you will soon see. But the support of XML generation in Rails is sick slick. I would love to write about that in the future, as there are plenty of gotchas to learn about and work around.

I was not responsible for the Flash side of this project, not in the least. It was perfected by one of the masters of the craft, along with two other cool Flash guys. Hats off to them. Next week they get their 5 minutes of fame on this blog, as I will mention all team members by name when all is out in the open and the stupid NDA is moot.

Alright, I have to get going, as I have to eat dinner before I throw myself into the pit of overtime one last time. It’s all smooth sailing after Thursday night.

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, system.architecture, web.architecture, web.services

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