Recently in work Category
Today is our last day at the current WeatherBill office. Monday we'll be installed in our new Soma digs. The below has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Tomorrow is my first day as a full-time engineer at WeatherBill. I've been working there for a couple weeks as a contractor, but we all decided we wanted to snuggle a little closer together, so I'm going FT. I'm working with a couple old friends, which is pretty great, and for a still-early-stage startup, there's a pretty high percentage of people in the company that I enjoy getting drinks with after work. That hasn't really been the case since I worked at Critical Path in the late 90s, so I'm pretty stoked to be there.
This may be a surprising development to some, as the last time I discussed anything professional here, I was talking about joining Metaweb. Well, that job didn't last very long - a week, to be exact. It turned out that I didn't get a very accurate picture during the interview process of what my job would be like. Once I actually started, it became obvious very quickly that I hadn't understood exactly what kind of work I'd be doing, and I knew I wasn't going to be happy. This is not a comment on Metaweb; I have a lot of respect for them and hope they are successful. It just wasn't a good fit for me.
And so, after one smallish contract gig building a site in Rails, I'm back to Java land. For the last few weeks I've been doing some work with the most modern versions of Spring and Hibernate, learning FreeMarker, and even hacking on the browser side a bit with jQuery for remoting and DOM manipulation. Though Spring especially has come a long way in terms of embracing convention over configuration, Rails is still way ahead of it, especially in the amount of support Rails has for Ajax communication, at both the template and controller level. I've found myself more than once this week looking at the Rails API docs to figure out how to build custom FreeMarker macros that are reminiscent of ActionView's form_remote_tag and friends. I've always been about stealing ideas from the language I wish I was working in to make the language I'm actually working in suck a little less, so this whole thing feels pretty natural to me, and I hope that I can eventually make some of this code available for other folks who might be stuck in Java land and not have time to explore Rails enough to be able to steal some of its treasures for yourself.
This may be a surprising development to some, as the last time I discussed anything professional here, I was talking about joining Metaweb. Well, that job didn't last very long - a week, to be exact. It turned out that I didn't get a very accurate picture during the interview process of what my job would be like. Once I actually started, it became obvious very quickly that I hadn't understood exactly what kind of work I'd be doing, and I knew I wasn't going to be happy. This is not a comment on Metaweb; I have a lot of respect for them and hope they are successful. It just wasn't a good fit for me.
And so, after one smallish contract gig building a site in Rails, I'm back to Java land. For the last few weeks I've been doing some work with the most modern versions of Spring and Hibernate, learning FreeMarker, and even hacking on the browser side a bit with jQuery for remoting and DOM manipulation. Though Spring especially has come a long way in terms of embracing convention over configuration, Rails is still way ahead of it, especially in the amount of support Rails has for Ajax communication, at both the template and controller level. I've found myself more than once this week looking at the Rails API docs to figure out how to build custom FreeMarker macros that are reminiscent of ActionView's form_remote_tag and friends. I've always been about stealing ideas from the language I wish I was working in to make the language I'm actually working in suck a little less, so this whole thing feels pretty natural to me, and I hope that I can eventually make some of this code available for other folks who might be stuck in Java land and not have time to explore Rails enough to be able to steal some of its treasures for yourself.