In which the author retraces his steps… slowly.

I don’t think I’ve ever really truly been ambivalent about anything before. In high school and university I garnered a reputation for being almost unflappable; that I could let anything slide. Something went wrong, and it wasn’t a big deal. Never really experienced ambivalence, as it’s properly described—that the subject feels strongly about the object, but in opposite directions at once. Not until now, not until tonight.

I have never been simultaneously so happy to have largely abandoned Microsoft’s operating systems and Web browser for my daily use and first-line development testing, and so spectacularly frustrated. I’ve been having some difficulty with the Windows XP partition on my main computer at home for a while now, mainly because I was using a particularly poorly-designed firewall (Comodo Personal Firewall, for those keeping score—I’d advise you to never install it)… I’d attempted to upgrade the software, but the previous version refused to be removed first. Deleting it didn’t help; there were still innumerable system hooks that actually wound up making it impossible to use the Internet! I thought perhaps the firewall had rewritten the network stack, and hypothesised that upgrading the operating system to Service Pack 3 would help. Needless to say, it didn’t, but I eventually managed to excise the demonspawn firewall. Somewhere in here, I also upgraded to Internet Explorer 8—after even Microsoft started actively encouraging the switch, for safety reasons, I knew its time had finally come and I could stop supporting it.

Unwisely, I tried the new version of the firewall, and now explorer.exe has become quite possibly the least-responsive piece of software on the computer. I can’t be 100% certain that these are causally related, because I can’t find any trace of the firewall on the system, and I’ve followed the same removal steps as the last time, and Windows Explorer hasn’t improved any.

This is all just context… a secondary source of frustration, because it means my computer is running far slower than it ever normally did prior to all these changes. The real frustration is that I’m jumping through all these hoops (all the while trying to install Subversion, Apache and MySQL on a FreeBSD 6.0 server with a 500 MHz Celeron processor in PuTTY) so that I can track down an IE-specific rendering bug in my new contract. Unfortunately the bug is so specific that it’s only appearing in Internet Explorer 7! At this point, anyone who’s intimiately familiar with how deeply-tied Microsoft’s browser and operating system are knows exactly what’s become necessary: In order to install IE7, I have to first uninstall IE8. However, in order to uninstall IE8, I have to revert the SP3 upgrade. This is a large and significant problem, because the upgrade itself cost me more than two hours! That process is currently running in the background as I write this (and checkout the current branch of the project to the small Celeron machine, dubbed mouse). I am, nonetheless, quite distinctly far from amused by Microsoft’s decision to make IE8 and SP3 so deeply integrated that, if IE8 is installed prior to SP3 (which I’m fairly sure is what happened; while Comodo had disable the majority of my connectivity, Windows Update continued to operate), then removing the former requires removing the latter by design. It’s certainly further motivation to move to Europe!

In which good news is announced

The past… roughly sixty-six hours have been pretty exciting in my neck of the woods, for a number of reasons:

1. I met a recruiter downtown regarding a twelve-month contract situated (if memory serves) very near to my home, for a major classifieds website you’ve probably heard of. I was told that my resumé will be submitted, so hopefully I’ll be contacted for a phone interview.
2. I heard from another recruiter, this one with disappointing, but not altogether surprising, news: the client that had been given my resumé, regarding a front-end position, said they’ll not be seeking an interview with me. Disappointing because it means no job there, but not surprising because the bulk of my skill set lies in back end development (as you’ve probably discovered, if you’ve been following my writing), with less emphasis on front end technologies. My Flash is rusty and creaky; I have no Flex or Air; I could keep going, but I’d rather not, because…
3. Yet another recruiter got in touch with me about a brief, lucrative contract, working out of my home, picking up where another developer has had to bow out due to time pressures. He wanted to know how I’d feel about picking up a mostly-there project built on Symfony, with jQuery as the JavaScript framework: an MVC framework to which I have minimal (but positive) exposure, and the whipping-boy JS framework of comp.lang.javascript that I’ve never touched (I use Prototype in Project Alchemy and Project McLuhan). Recruiter knew this, passed on what I am familiar with and mentioned that I tested well in his company’s PHP skills test, and the client wanted to get in touch with me anyway. After a couple of hours to look at the source code, I was confident I’d be able to get myself up to speed with Symfony over the course of the weekend. I met with the client on Saturday over coffee, met with the previous developer on Sunday, and, well… I’ve already nailed down two of the end user’s major we-want-this-fixed-by-the-beginning-of-business-Wednesday bugs!

So yes, dear readers, I am (or rather, will be, once I’ve signed the contract) gainfully employed—at least for the month of February! I feel good; I feel energised… and I feel that by the middle of February I’ll have two new things I’ll be able to add to resumé! I think my lack of previous jQuery has been a bit of a sticking point—everybody uses it! So now, I’ll be able to say I can use jQuery.

This gig is going to be a great stretch of my skills. I’ve already hit the ground running (thank God that Symfony’s interpretation of MVC is fairly similar to Zend’s!), so as long as I hit this Wednesday’s deadline, everything should be great… and I don’t see any reason why I won’t be able to hit it.

This was a good weekend, and one that I’ve been waiting for for quite a while now. With any luck, this contract will turn into further opportunities with this client, which will mean (fairly) regular work and more opportunities to expand what I do!

One closing note: Looking at Symfony, I have to say that I’m already pretty much in love with it. It’s got a very similar logic to Zend (and, near as I can tell, is similarly modular, which I like), but it’s got a lot of back-office automation, kind of like Cake and Rails, that unburdens the developers, and it doesn’t appear to be doing so in an ugly an inefficient way! I’m almost mad that I hadn’t found it in the summer of 2008—so many things would probably be different! Project Alchemy would probably be much farther along than it is (I’ve been having trouble with the ORM layer and articulating join logic as associative arrays). Also, it’s kind of a pity that I’ve found it now, rather than long before, because I’m also about to start learning Python, which I’ve been meaning to do, in order to move away from the Failboat that will be PHP 6.

Ahh well, can’t always do everything right the first time you do it, right? Otherwise, you’d never learn anything!

Wish me luck this month; I’m going to be awfully busy!