Category: Work

Video: Parachuting into Drupal Crazy

This week I spoke at the DBUG Drupal meetup in Denver about an unglamorous but very important thing that comes up for any technologist: turning around applications that have, for one reason or another, left their users unhappy.

I also had no idea that DBUG meets in a TV studio and is broadcast live on public access TV and the web. Thankfully, my doctor has me on some really good blood pressure meds.

My talk covers some of the strategic, technical, and personal things that people can do to fall back in love with their Drupal applications again. (The non-technical aspects are really applicable to any software.)

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(I start my talk at the 19 minute mark.)

I want to thank DBUG for inviting me, and Aten Design Group and Denver Open Media for their sponsorship and work to make this event happen.

Slides are at http://zeke.ws/DrupalParachuting .

Zeke’s Life, Spring 2010 edition: Be Here Now

I don’t know where the last couple of days have gone, but I want my weekend back!

I haven’t been posting a lot about daily life this semester because I am lucky enough to actually be very consumed with school and the career search. I really didn’t expect things to hit me so hard all of a sudden, but I’ve been going seemingly nonstop since January or February. For the most part I’ve been handling it OK, though I’ve definitely had to shift gears on my daily routine.

One unfortunate truth is that I get so distracted having my desk in my bedroom that it’s pretty hard to be productive from home, so I find myself kicking myself out of the house a lot to get stuff done – to the CSU library if the time is right, but more often than not, I’m at the Alley Cat, Fort Collins’ 24/7 coffeeshop near campus. I quickly gained my FourSquare mayorship, I’ve had more than one precarious 4 AM bike ride home in varying levels of snow, and I am not going to tell you how much money I spend there. (The cost of the coffee and food is far offset by my productivity gains from the removed distractions.)

Currently on my plate are two big midterms and one case study on my own while working together on a huge paper and presentation with another group. Somewhere in there, I also need to find room to squeeze in a freelance project and the hunt for a job (Not knowing what I’m doing a month from now? Not the greatest feeling!) Despite all that, I feel like I’ve been ramping up the workload so steadily now that I can still manage to get stuff done without self-destructing. It’s interesting, though – I really haven’t felt this intense, stressful-yet-exciting kind of routine since my last senior year, back in high school. Back then I was juggling AP exams, college applications, understaffing at work, and a family with a 14 year old and a 4 year old at home. The situation has changed, but it’s the same old story: I’m super busy, but it’s almost all really worthwhile stuff that has me excited for what lies ahead.

I’m still actually working on the answer to what does lie ahead. On the practical level, I’m looking for systems analysis, sales engineer, and web developer opportunities in Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins and San Francisco. But I’m wondering a lot more about long-term stuff: what do I want my life to look like? Do I want to move to a big downtown area and try the urban yuppie lifestyle? Do I want to travel? Do I go back to Spain or do I take care of my massive international “to-do” list? Since I’m at a point in my life where I have the freedom to make those decisions, I feel like I should really think a lot about them before I commit myself to one path for a while, since I’m just finishing up this 4-year “chapter.”

I find myself thinking back to a walk I took a year ago alone on the dunes of the Sahara: it was there that I felt the most clarity and perspective I’ve ever experienced. That wasn’t really a “what am I going to do with my life” kind of moment; it was more like a time where all distractions were removed to the point where all that remained was the pure essence of being in communion with all that really matters in the world. A few months later, I was back in the daily grind when this line from Six Feet Under hit me like a ton of bricks:

All we have is this moment, right here, right now. The future is just a fucking concept that we use to avoid being alive today. So, Be. Here. Now.

I never expected to get a serious philosophical revelation from an HBO show, but it really does explain it all. The stuff I have going on isn’t necessarily irrelevant, but it’s really important to me that I don’t get lost in it. I want to go after a lifestyle for my future. My goal is not to save for retirement, or be super successful, or be the best person in my professional field. I don’t want to burn out on stress to the point that I need a vacation to recharge my spiritual batteries. I want to work towards making every aspect of my life: personal, professional, social, financial, spiritual, whatever – into things that enrich my life and the lives of everyone around me. And that’s it. Anything that doesn’t work towards that probably shouldn’t be there.

Post-baccalaureate life: The view from September

(I said post-baccalaureate in case there’s a secret Double Word Score box in this blogging program 😀 )

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do when I get out of college, and three options I like have presented themselves:

  1. Peace Corps. I’m applying now, and trying to figure out if I fully grasp the magnitude of the commitment I’d be making.
  2. Nontraditional job- freelancing, contracting, or startup work. This would give me some freedom when it comes to workplaces, schedules, and might let me do some of the other things I’ve gotten the itch to do (mainly travel and music). Then again, the unsteady source of income might totally stress me out. I bet I’d figure it out pretty quickly though.
  3. Find a good full-time job that doesn’t drain my energy and hopefully could fund some serious hobbyist music at night. I could also see trying to do this abroad in Spain, if I can swing it somehow.

I like all three. I’m in no rush to choose (besides getting my Peace Corps application stuff in on time) and am actively researching opportunities for them all. Feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions as well!

BIG news – I’m staying in Spain!

UPDATE: This it total April Fools’ Day BS. And I am a tool for doing so.

Oh man. I don’t know where to start…

I GET TO LIVE HERE IN SPAIN.

I just got a job with Internetiza Solutions – a Web 2.0 firm based in Madrid. It turns out they’re looking for some VB .NET developers, and since that’s my favorite language and platform to develop with, it was a fit!

Internetiza is more concerned with skills than academic credentials, so after my semester in Granada ends, I’ll move up to Madrid and work from there. They’re going to help with relocation, visas, all of that – it should all go really smoothly.

I know that this will take some of you by surprise, since I haven’t mentioned this to anybody as of yet. The truth is that I have been considering this over the last week. It’s a very serious one – moving so far from almost everyone I know isn’t something I take lightly. When I got the offer, I decided I needed to kind of mantain radio silence about it so I could really mull it over on my own without any outside influences.

Part of my decision was based on my love of Spain – I’ve really fit in well here, and I seem to be more compatible with the Spanish mindset than I am with the stuff I’m used to back home. Also, with the economy the way it is right now, I feel it’s probably the best idea to live somewhere with a socialist government in place.

I can’t wait to get working with Internetiza- I can’t say what, but they’re working on something really big and exciting. They’ll be keeping me pretty busy; I probably won’t be able to make it back to the States to visit and get the rest of my things until Thanksgiving or so.

I’ll fill you all in on more details later – there’s so much to talk about! I just wanted to let everyone know now that I’ve made my decision.

Open Source Entrepreneurship: How to survive while starting a FOSS web app project?

Today I had an idea about a pretty big web publishing / content aggregation platform that I’d like to get started on as a FOSS project. This post isn’t really about that idea – I’ll share that later when the time is right – but more about my own uncertainty of the right way to proceed with a rather large undertaking at this point in my life. There are quite a few unknowns in my mind:

  • My age / career situation: I am a year away from graduating from college. I think a project of this scale would demand a lot of attention, but also has high potential for success in both terms of adoption and related commercial opportunities. I know of plenty of very successful young programmers who dropped out of college once the success of their product made formal education unnecessary for them: Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg and Mullenweg are all great examples. Now I’m not in a rush to drop out of school – I wouldn’t even consider it unless the project had such momentum that it was obviously justifiable.
    What I’m more worried about is what I could do after graduation. I should be thinking about what career moves are wise at that point. That might mean full-time tech work, it might not. I think that especially at first, this project would require a lot of attention without lots of financial backing. I might be able to manage it at the same time as a part time job, 20 to 30 hours a week. And that’s assuming I don’t end up at a job that has weird IP policies that say they have a right to all of my code. Ideally, I’d like to find a way to fund the development of this OSS product so that I could see it turn from idea into reality while still being able to do things like have health insurance and decent food and beer 😀
  • How to go about development: At this point, the project only exists as a few ideas floating around my head. My business classes have taught me enough to know that others probably have pretty similar ideas, and since this product would be something open source and available to all, I’m more interested in having it done right than I am in being first to market or whatever. As a total newcomer to open source web applications, and as a fairly unskilled programmer, I’m not sure about the best way ahead. I have the potential to learn a lot more of the technical backend and do a lot of the initial work myself, but it might be a better strategy to bring other people on pretty early and just provide input as an “idea man”.
  • How to pace myself and avoid scope creep: My idea starts out with some very big-picture concepts about current developments in content publishing and media consumption, and gets more detailed with some ways that I could implement my new system. In other words, I have a large vision for where this could go, how it would open content publication and facilitate media consumption for many people, and of related commercial opportunities that would be created. Organizing that vision into smaller action items and not biting off more than I can chew will be the hard parts.

So in short, I’m really excited to get into working on this project, but need to figure out how to do it without shooting my own wellbeing in the foot. I know it’s possible, I just need to find some more of the answers first.

Site Design

I just finished making my dad’s website. I’m pretty proud of it, since it’s the first design from scratch that I’ve done in about two years. It’s nice to see that i’ve improved in that time.

I’m thinking about getting a bit more serious about web design stuff. I might launch a little design service for artists and small businesses in northern Colorado. I have to ponder naming, how I would market it, et cetera… But I’ve really enjoyed the work I’ve done for several clients this summer. I find that it doesn’t suck me dry when I’m working. So keep an eye out, and in the meantime, tell me what you think of Dad’s site.

Promoted

So I make it a point not to blog about work much, lest I be dooced or otherwise draw the wrath of the drama demons. But I figure this is worth mentioning, since it’s kinda big-

I am now Security Team Lead at work. It’s a big fancy title, with the responsibilities and abilities to be blamed for more stuff that come with it.
Quite obviously I’m excited – it’s nice to be moving up in what I anticipate to be my career field. But overall, it is big and intimidating… I have a lot to learn. But it’s probably like learning to swim: the best way to learn is to be thrown into the lake and be forced to learn, and learn quickly.
So w00t? w00t.

I also just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, my blogging engine… And I must say that I can’t believe what passes for a stable release these days. It’s buggy on my end, writing posts and stuff… the WYSIWYG editor is missing images, so I have to handcode if I want to format anything… and a lot of the scripts are still really buggy. 2.1 came out of beta way too early, and I’m not the happiest that they passed it off as stable. Usually I’ll trust Open Source stable builds, since they’re community edited and quickly patched.
But for the 93% of you who aren’t Alan, all this means for you is that there is a possibility that something might not work right. Like viewing from Xanga or something. 
UPDATE: I was an idiot, and blamed WordPress for something that was my fault – it’s called clear your cache. F5, stupid, F5!
(This I discovered after a couple of hours restoring backups, messing with FTP servers, merging old files… And it was all a tiny browser issue! Avast!)