let me tell you about...
...my job.
all my colleagues are pretty much whites, those that i see everydayy. i cannot be absolutely sure, there might be someone other than thats hiding somewhere. also, i saw a non-white some day back, dunno if he's part of the office or was just droppin by. anyway, i dont mean to sound discriminatory. im not white, and im proud of it.
my desk is in front of my boss' door and the second floor landing, next to the humongously-sized bean bag, under an open air conditioner vent and behind the balcony which overlooks the welcome desk below and the over-sized inflatable snowman. on top of the desk is the only 19" CRT monitor you'll find in the whole office(i think), everyone else's using and LCD. after about 10 hours of staring at the screen, my eyes begin to hurt. i sure am glad i got an LCD screen here at home, that way i can stay up all night without hurting my eyes.
this past week i have been going into overtime. though we don't have overtime pay(i think) since im not in a human-labor service position. its taking me a while to get into the flow of things(programming whole day). and its partly caused by my my brain which is still in "short-attention-span" mode. months of idle living means the brain has to come up with something to keep it from being bored.
so basically a day in the office goes like this:
i come in around 8am. i'm one of the first 5 people to come in. i can't be the first, i don't have a key. colleagues come in around 9, boss around 10.
lunch? working lunch! working lunch time? when you get hungry! workmates usually leave around 12:30 to get some take-out, they'll be back in about 10mins. when you're caught up in work you sometimes forget to eat, which was what happened to one of our project managers who had lunch at 3pm. me? i prepare a sandwich or two, faster and easier to eat=more productivity!
people start leaving around 6. i leave, on average, around 7. i'm not a workaholic. its just that, IM A FILIPINO!!! and filipinos, generally, dont feel satisfied if they leave unfinished work behind. filipinos dont drop everything when the clock hits 5. filipinos... ok stop with the patronizing. ive been going into overtime cause im not yet anywhere near finished with my project which, by the way, was supposed to be due today. still is. i dont know what will happen. gad, its so frustrating!
---start geeky stuff---
i'm the new php guy. im their 2nd php developer. the senior php developer has been into php for like, i dunno, 10 years? the brought me on-board to basically handle whatever tasks my senior has no time to handle, that means pretty much everything php that comes their way cause he's working on a pretty amazing program right now which i'll share later. so my project for now is to expand on an existing website of a client. the website is that of an online shop. the client basically used an open source solution, namely OS Commerce(or open source commerce). its a full-featured website which does a ton of things. all a user has to do is download, install, then put in your settings and products, then you've got an online shop! easy to deploy. a real pain to expand or customize.
editing, expanding or customizing softwares or applications will always be a bummer. its not enough that you know the language its written in, you have to have tons of patience and the ability to connect seemingly unrelated things. you see, when modifying programs, you not only have to know by heart what it is that you want to modify so that you won't lose your focus, you also have to be able to think like the its original programmers. if you fail to make your mind work like theirs, you will most likely fail. each programmer has his own style of programming, and i'm not just talking about indentations and spacing here.
the programmers of oscommerce opted for an object-oriented approach. cool. throw in stored definitions, functions and procedures, you could end up with a nose-bleed if you don't keep your head. its very different from how we used to code in php back in school. you'd find little to no operations in the mixed php-html pages. in fact, it think it was trying to be a java-jsp emulation. of course, it cant do that, java-jsp is much more amazing when it comes to that. anyway, i finally got the hang of it and i'm picking up pace. and did i mention i was working with a live site? i have to make immediate backup restores each time something goes wrong. thats the other thing with modifying program. more often than not, porting it to a development machine won't always work. i tried to, but i had to give up cause it was going to take too much of my time just to set it up.
i also worked on fixing a bug for one of our designers. he was having trouble with the underlying php code cause it messes up the template he was working on. same case as with my project, the client got gallery, an open open source photo album and organizer. only this is much worse! i've never seen php code so unlike php! i had to add a line of code which went like: {if $user.isRegisteredUser} {/if} does that look anything like php to you??
so a plea to programmers out there, just because you're the one building it up from scratch doesn't mean you can program away with no regard to future mods and DOCUMENTATION!
---end geeky stuff---
but im not complaining about my work. i like it there, though i haven't gotten the chance to get up from my desk and get to know most of the guys. by the way, its a woman's world in our office. our bosses are guys, but our project managers are a couple of ladies. they're in charge of pretty much running everything internally(like hiring people and assigning projects). apart from them, the only other woman is our receptionist. the rest are guys. that's why we've got the football table thingy in the middle of the workplace. and that's also why the ladies get to redesign the whole place whenever they want(and as well as place scents in the restrooms and play an ambient background music).
as i said, i like the workplace. its fast-paced and everyone's doing something. its not a workplace where there's always somebody breathing down your neck. and i get to be a part of the office where dizzler was born! i think it was launched last monday, the day before my first day. they're still monitoring it closely cause they've been getting a lot of hits and a lot of emails(some bugs, some suggestions, a lot of stupid 'how come this doesn't work with me?'). so for the past week, whichever is set to autoplay on the dizzler's webpage would play out loud from one of the development team's speakers while they're debugging it. and i(well as everyone else in the office) am glad that its no longer sexyback! and by the way, it was coded using php! my senior is part of the development team and this is top priority, thats why im handling his overflows. probably when my my plates empty i'll go over and study it. its pretty slick, looks like its xml-ized. so, visit dizzler.com here!
lastly, about work...
somehow everytime i leave the office for home at night, i have a bigger-smile-than-last-nights' smile on my face, even though im not yet done with the project. i guess i somehow feel that finally, i feel like i'm doing something which i know is directly affecting someone else(alleviating the headache of the clent, hopefully). which brings me to the topic of my next post...
til my next post tomorrow!
ps. pardon my english, well, pardon my writing, here. if you've noticed, everything are like just phrases separated with '.'s and joined by ','s. i've been sleep-deprived(not really, not just used to it yet) lately and my fingers have a life of their own again.
all my colleagues are pretty much whites, those that i see everydayy. i cannot be absolutely sure, there might be someone other than thats hiding somewhere. also, i saw a non-white some day back, dunno if he's part of the office or was just droppin by. anyway, i dont mean to sound discriminatory. im not white, and im proud of it.
my desk is in front of my boss' door and the second floor landing, next to the humongously-sized bean bag, under an open air conditioner vent and behind the balcony which overlooks the welcome desk below and the over-sized inflatable snowman. on top of the desk is the only 19" CRT monitor you'll find in the whole office(i think), everyone else's using and LCD. after about 10 hours of staring at the screen, my eyes begin to hurt. i sure am glad i got an LCD screen here at home, that way i can stay up all night without hurting my eyes.
this past week i have been going into overtime. though we don't have overtime pay(i think) since im not in a human-labor service position. its taking me a while to get into the flow of things(programming whole day). and its partly caused by my my brain which is still in "short-attention-span" mode. months of idle living means the brain has to come up with something to keep it from being bored.
so basically a day in the office goes like this:
i come in around 8am. i'm one of the first 5 people to come in. i can't be the first, i don't have a key. colleagues come in around 9, boss around 10.
lunch? working lunch! working lunch time? when you get hungry! workmates usually leave around 12:30 to get some take-out, they'll be back in about 10mins. when you're caught up in work you sometimes forget to eat, which was what happened to one of our project managers who had lunch at 3pm. me? i prepare a sandwich or two, faster and easier to eat=more productivity!
people start leaving around 6. i leave, on average, around 7. i'm not a workaholic. its just that, IM A FILIPINO!!! and filipinos, generally, dont feel satisfied if they leave unfinished work behind. filipinos dont drop everything when the clock hits 5. filipinos... ok stop with the patronizing. ive been going into overtime cause im not yet anywhere near finished with my project which, by the way, was supposed to be due today. still is. i dont know what will happen. gad, its so frustrating!
---start geeky stuff---
i'm the new php guy. im their 2nd php developer. the senior php developer has been into php for like, i dunno, 10 years? the brought me on-board to basically handle whatever tasks my senior has no time to handle, that means pretty much everything php that comes their way cause he's working on a pretty amazing program right now which i'll share later. so my project for now is to expand on an existing website of a client. the website is that of an online shop. the client basically used an open source solution, namely OS Commerce(or open source commerce). its a full-featured website which does a ton of things. all a user has to do is download, install, then put in your settings and products, then you've got an online shop! easy to deploy. a real pain to expand or customize.
editing, expanding or customizing softwares or applications will always be a bummer. its not enough that you know the language its written in, you have to have tons of patience and the ability to connect seemingly unrelated things. you see, when modifying programs, you not only have to know by heart what it is that you want to modify so that you won't lose your focus, you also have to be able to think like the its original programmers. if you fail to make your mind work like theirs, you will most likely fail. each programmer has his own style of programming, and i'm not just talking about indentations and spacing here.
the programmers of oscommerce opted for an object-oriented approach. cool. throw in stored definitions, functions and procedures, you could end up with a nose-bleed if you don't keep your head. its very different from how we used to code in php back in school. you'd find little to no operations in the mixed php-html pages. in fact, it think it was trying to be a java-jsp emulation. of course, it cant do that, java-jsp is much more amazing when it comes to that. anyway, i finally got the hang of it and i'm picking up pace. and did i mention i was working with a live site? i have to make immediate backup restores each time something goes wrong. thats the other thing with modifying program. more often than not, porting it to a development machine won't always work. i tried to, but i had to give up cause it was going to take too much of my time just to set it up.
i also worked on fixing a bug for one of our designers. he was having trouble with the underlying php code cause it messes up the template he was working on. same case as with my project, the client got gallery, an open open source photo album and organizer. only this is much worse! i've never seen php code so unlike php! i had to add a line of code which went like: {if $user.isRegisteredUser} {/if} does that look anything like php to you??
so a plea to programmers out there, just because you're the one building it up from scratch doesn't mean you can program away with no regard to future mods and DOCUMENTATION!
---end geeky stuff---
but im not complaining about my work. i like it there, though i haven't gotten the chance to get up from my desk and get to know most of the guys. by the way, its a woman's world in our office. our bosses are guys, but our project managers are a couple of ladies. they're in charge of pretty much running everything internally(like hiring people and assigning projects). apart from them, the only other woman is our receptionist. the rest are guys. that's why we've got the football table thingy in the middle of the workplace. and that's also why the ladies get to redesign the whole place whenever they want(and as well as place scents in the restrooms and play an ambient background music).
as i said, i like the workplace. its fast-paced and everyone's doing something. its not a workplace where there's always somebody breathing down your neck. and i get to be a part of the office where dizzler was born! i think it was launched last monday, the day before my first day. they're still monitoring it closely cause they've been getting a lot of hits and a lot of emails(some bugs, some suggestions, a lot of stupid 'how come this doesn't work with me?'). so for the past week, whichever is set to autoplay on the dizzler's webpage would play out loud from one of the development team's speakers while they're debugging it. and i(well as everyone else in the office) am glad that its no longer sexyback! and by the way, it was coded using php! my senior is part of the development team and this is top priority, thats why im handling his overflows. probably when my my plates empty i'll go over and study it. its pretty slick, looks like its xml-ized. so, visit dizzler.com here!
lastly, about work...
somehow everytime i leave the office for home at night, i have a bigger-smile-than-last-nights' smile on my face, even though im not yet done with the project. i guess i somehow feel that finally, i feel like i'm doing something which i know is directly affecting someone else(alleviating the headache of the clent, hopefully). which brings me to the topic of my next post...
til my next post tomorrow!
ps. pardon my english, well, pardon my writing, here. if you've noticed, everything are like just phrases separated with '.'s and joined by ','s. i've been sleep-deprived(not really, not just used to it yet) lately and my fingers have a life of their own again.
3 comments:
did i ever mention to you that i'm working as a part-time php developer now? and i've got your answers right here.
the code {if $user}{/if} is a part of Smarty, a template engine that developers use to seperate design and logic.
Why? It's because its much simpler that way. With a template engine, you can place your code in one file, and your layout in another. Sure, you'll end up with more files, but it's so much easier to manage.
Since I've started with this job, I've realized that the PHP we were using in college was barbaric and crude. I can't believe no one ever taught us this... sheesh.
Anyway, for any questions... message me up, I'd be glad to help :D
And, oh yeah, GO FLIPZ!!! >_>
wow, well that explains it. i hated it. but our designer likes it, much easier for them to work with.
i guess i gotta be acquainted with it, i heard thats the one of the next projects i'll handle.
chee, i love expanding websites but hate it at the same time. i love the challenge of pickin apart the brain of who made it, and hate having the need to pick apart my own brain to be the one who'll make it work.
and yes, our brand of php was barbaric. but i loved the simplicity and straight-forwardness. although yes, its not a good idea to use it for big websites.
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