The New Gig
The new job began yesterday, and so far I’m delighted. Here’s a few observations contrasting the old job and the new one after the first day.
The old job was south of the Capitol, with a commanding view of the Capitol Power Plant, and a couple government buildings done in the 70’s “Brutalist” style. There was one place to score food within short walking distance, the coffee sucked, and when the half-and-half thimble packets ran out at 9:50 a.m., that was it for the day.
The new job is around Farragut Square, a few blocks from the White House and smack in the middle of DC’s bustling downtown. There’s pedestrian traffic everywhere, more eateries than my appetite could index in a day, urban cyclists of many varieties, and plenty of coffee (some of which doesn’t suck at all). Additionally, I saw several hundred people not wearing gray suits. Neat.
At the old job, trying to find so much as a BicStic and a legal pad was a pain. The new job has plenty of supplies, but there’s also a Staples right around the corner. I now have 4 gel pens with comfort grips and two brand spankin’ new spiral bound graph paper notebooks. I’d have gotten more, but there’s no need to hoard. I can just go back, it’s right there.
Code at the old job was a series of hacks on top of hacks. The main platform was PHP, and had no discernable architecture. Occasionally, I’d find SQL queries in the goddam templates. With the exception of one valiant team’s efforts, coding style, revision control, and release schedules were foreign concepts. One Tuesday morning after a 3-day weekend, we came in to find the site broken, because a couple cowboys decided to push some untested code into our production environment the night before (yep, on a holiday!) without telling anyone. Yeehaw!
The new gig is all about Perl. An initial survey of one application I’ll be working on revealed a solid architecture almost immediately, and the first few modules I opened up featured well commented code. I’m not talking about “this does that thing to the whatsit” kind of comments, I mean a paragraph in plain English explaining what a method does, how it’s meant to be used, caveats, and exceptions. I saw a copy of Damien Conway’s Perl Best Practices out on one developer’s desk. Aw yeah, that’s it.
The new gig has a wiki, and it’s useful. Besides a section of Perl coding practices they cleave to, there’s a Perl Cookbook section that gives real examples of how to use the various utilities and how to subclass important superclasses. This isn’t the kind of documentation you wring out of unwilling developers, this is the kind created by people who believe documenting code is important.
Here’s the kicker: we have a system that can configure and deploy a complete development environment from a code branch auto-magically by way of a web-based application. Very slick. Releases are once a week, assuming that the release passes a battery of automated regression tests. Sexy? You bet.
It’s hard to predict accurately how things are going to work out, even dream jobs are capable of turning sour, but the indicators are excellent so far. I was looking out the third-floor window, behind my desk, and the world was lookin’ pretty good. Best of all, I think there’s a solid possibility I’m going to enjoy coding again.
Now, I don’t believe in signs or omens or messages from the universe, other than obvious ones like a funnel cloud being a message from the sky meaning, “get in your basement and get away from windows”, or “fuck you, Shady Glen Mobile Home Park”. But this view off the back porch last night sure seemed to put a nice finish on the day.
Double rainbow for the win! WOOOOO!
Tags: code, DC Urbanists, Perl, work
