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I thought that it might be time to give an update.  I have been very busy over with the agile evangelists at Integrum Technologies and have been loving every minute of all the things I’ve managed to absorb in the past few months.  My conversion to Rails has been drastically better than my past experience of learning other languages.  Within weeks I felt confident enough to start my own side projects and dive head-first into things that I used to wait months to fully understand how to do with previous conversions.

I have come to gain a very solid appreciation of AJAX, as long as it is done unobtrusively. I’ve also come to love the purpose and structure that a good MVC framework can provide.  I’ve come to swear by TextMate.  I can’t imagine managing a web project again without it.  I’ve found that pair programming provides amazing benefits that can never be guessed at until you’ve tried it yourself. I’ve found that my errors and refactoring due to pair programming have been exponentially improved and that my development style in general has become more efficent, more detailed, and more well-thought than in the past (in much less time).  I’ve also found that agile methodology as a method of software development just makes sense (for me at least).  Software (especially web based applications or sites) are constantly changing in their requirements, goals, needs, and acceptence criteria.  Agile methodology ties in perfectly with this dynamic lifestyle of software growth.

As to the other things that I’ve been up to, well I’ve started at least three side-projects Read the rest of this entry »

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For those of you who may have somehow not know, I was told I was being let go last week, so I’ve obviously been putting my resume out as much as possible since my last day of “vacation” from my current job runs out tomorrow as far as I know (nobody has bothered to e-mail me back as to how many actual hours I had or how many hours I was paid for last week…. talk about a failure of communication even after multiple e-mail requests). That’s a long story for another time though (I’m sure I’ll blog more about my job loss AFTER I have secured a new job…heh).

Anyway, I’ve probably submitted my resume to about 12+ jobs on Dice & Monster in the area that seem like decent to really good fits, but I’ve found that there’s even better opportunities and more relevant positions actually available on craigslist.org. I’d estimate that I’ve sent my resume to more than Read the rest of this entry »

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So I saw that nifty little notice in my administrative panel tonight at my in-laws house that says, “A new version of WordPress has been released. Update now” (or something along those lines). Generally a Major.Minor.Subminor update (2.5.0 -> 2.5.1 for example) means minor bugs & quirks were fixed, but more importantly, some security flaws were found and fixed. These updates are usually pretty darn important to be safe, but upgrading can be such a pain and so the minor updates often get put off until a new major version comes out.

Why is it always a pain you ask? Read the rest of this entry »

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