Posted by Joel
Sat, 20 May 2006 20:38:00 GMT
Right after writing my last update I got a call from the job I applied for, not ten minutes after I'd sent the email. I was in bed, and didn't have my contacts in, but our chat went well and we scheduled an interview for Monday.
Then the unthinkable happened. I don't like to refer to companies by name here, but I got an email from a big company for a web engineering position. A very big company. The big company. I don't want to get mine or any one else's hopes up, but I've been doing their worksheet feverishly.
I got some Cafe Abir yesterday, which was great -- I've learned to enjoy more normal things while still overall limiting calories on my diet -- and David and I went to 821 for a short time.
I hit a new low on the scale today at 179 lbs. Feels great to be out of the 180s. I really feel that I look better, especially around my neck.
There are some interesting things planned for this weekend.
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Posted by Joel
Fri, 19 May 2006 18:34:00 GMT
Today is my brother's 30th birthday. Happy birthday, Ben.
Yesterday was the worst day in recent memory. I started to get antsy because the guy from the startup who had told me they were going to make an offer to me just three days ago didn't get back to me by the time he said he would. I knew something was wrong so I emailed him.
Around 10 at night he finally emails me back and says they've ended up going with someone else. I was pretty heartbroken.
I emailed that big company who I'd told to take me off consideration because I had an offer over a week ago, and sure enough they were already pretty far along with another candidate.
So now I'm back to Square 1. It's taking all of my effort not to mope around and feel sorry for myself. I applied for another job, which -- to be honest -- has the best product idea of the bunch, and, yes, is a Rails project (what else?)
After experimenting more with testing, I found myself still somewhat torn on it. It seems like a definite waste of time to test absolutely everything. Stuff like the typical CRUD routine, or pagination, or whatever; seems like it would be best used on the more custom code. I feel like having to write extensive tests before I do anything is a huge waste of time. Why turn two lines of code into twenty? I feel like that's effectively what I'm doing. Why can't I just assume the validation works? I mean, why wouldn't it?
I guess I just need more experience, but I still feel that this book advocates over-testing. I think it has a place, but it's not to be used quite as frequently or on things which should really just never be breaking. Use common sense, I guess? I've historically not had much of a problem with breaking stuff in a completely unrelated area, and honestly I find the idea something of a myth. Somehow I've gotten by with "testing" by merely using the feature I just worked on and seeing if it worked.
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Posted by Joel
Thu, 18 May 2006 22:50:00 GMT
Yesterday I did a lot of reading, researching and experimentation on testing. And that's about all I did. I'm still moving through this book.
Craig gave me a call when he was done with the JavaOne conference and I went and picked him up. We went to my place and sat around for a bit, then we went off to Magnolia in the Haight. We walked over to Cole Valley and got a crepe and coffee. Came back, played some pool at Fly, then just went back to my apartment and watched TV. Was really cool to see him again and I had a good time.
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Posted by Joel
Wed, 17 May 2006 16:59:00 GMT
The primary factor of yesterday was how engrossed I got in this Rails book. I've already learned a lot of things from it and am nearly a third of the way done. My experience with the book has been so good that I'm thinking of reading more technical books in the future.
I tend to approach learning by looking things up or asking questions when I am confused about something, and after enough accesses, I sort of absorb the information long-term. This works well enough, but I think a fairly long and structured "course" of sorts can really work wonders at fleshing out the details. In particular, I'd found certain conventions that worked for me, but there were really better ones out there that I'd never know as I'd no real reason to look them up. This helped me learn more of what I should be doing.
I started another, very small project, mainly to experiment with testing. This time, I'm being much more cautious about commits, and generally I think this is going to result in much better programming behavior in general. Consider me a convert.
Besides that, yesterday was marked by my eating fake meat sausages (and steamed broccoli again) for dinner. My brother often has fake meat around, and while different I've often found it pretty tasty, and these sausages were similar in that regard.
Craig came into town yesterday and gave me a call. We're going to hang out tonight.
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Posted by Joel
Tue, 16 May 2006 15:48:00 GMT
I've missed a day for the first time since starting this blog. Apologies. I'll keep it short.
Two days ago was Mother's Day. I drove up to Mom's place from LA. She and my sister and I went to a restaurant and had a good time.
I also (finally) bought the Rails book, despite how outdated it is. I mainly want to read about test-driven development, which I admit I have been unfairly prejudiced against in the past, and also scaling and deployment tricks.
We watched the Enron movie, which was really good, and The Weather Man, which I thought would be dumb but I actually liked it.
The situation with the new company is going well. I'll provide more details after the negotiations are finished, but it looks like I'll likely be working for them.
The next day I drove back to the Bay, dropped something off in Berkeley, went out to 821 to meet David and Katie, and came back, where we had a ridiculous argument; sometimes I tire of defending my sensitivity towards women's issues just because someone can't grasp the depth of popular mob shows.
Also, the new MacBook looks cool. If it has a decent screen, I'd get it instead of the Pro. Either way, barring some sort of accident, a new computer purchase for me is a ways off.
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Posted by Joel
Sun, 14 May 2006 17:06:00 GMT
Ben and I got some IHOP and went to his work for a bit. Afterwards we went to Mikey's place where we met with his many Japanese friends and had "nabe". Basically a bunch of food is cooked in a pot and we all take from it.
But it was really a lot of fun and I enjoyed the opportunity to speak a little bit of Japanese again.
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Posted by Joel
Sat, 13 May 2006 20:03:00 GMT
I walked around down to Sunset and looked for somewhere to get a bite to eat. I ended up getting three delicious beef tacos from a small stand called Los Burritos for about $3.50. I miss the Mexican food in LA.
We had plans to see a movie but ended up getting drunk. Which was just incredibly fun. I love this house.
This morning, Ben gave Paul's MySpace profile a makeover. And, having been a long time fan of the site, I ordered the Squashed Philosophers book.
I also discovered diggdot.us, which I find pretty funny.
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Posted by Joel
Fri, 12 May 2006 20:47:00 GMT
After doing that interview and some work yesterday I drove down to LA via the 5. It was a pretty hot day, and my A/C doesn't really work, so that was great. I stopped at a rest stop and wet down my face and hair with cold water, and had an ice cream from a vending machine.
I met with my brother and we went over Scientology promotional materials which a friend of his had gotten in the mail because the previous tenant evidently was involved with the cult. It was some of the creepiest shit I have ever read through. We lamented again that Beck and Jason Lee were Scientologists. His friend Nate showed up, and we talked about that, and the addictiveness and importance of Wikipedia.
We went with his roommate Tom down to a low lit bar called the Shortstop on Sunset, came back up, played and listened to some music (the new Sufjan b-sides), and I helped another of his roommates run Software Update on her Mac (last run January 2004).
I went to bed on the couch. This morning I met Lucas, a friend of Harvie's, a Nintendo DS game developer who is in town for E3. Sadly he was not able to hook me up with the ability to attend. Besides that I just did some work. And that's really the best part about contracting, is that I can do it from anywhere.
I'm thinking contracting is what I want to do, even with this job offer out there. So I don't know if I'm going to take it unless it pays really well. I like the guys behind it, and I think their project is cool enough, but I'm not sure if I'm into getting up at 8 every day and getting on a crowded bus, and then doing the same thing at 5, every day, week in week out, without any real semblance of freedom or convenience regarding work.
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Posted by Joel
Thu, 11 May 2006 19:34:00 GMT
Yesterday was very eventful. First was the interview, which I already covered. Then I went down to my client's place. I was a bit nervous of seeing them, as it'd been almost two months. But it was a productive hour and I thought we got along surprisingly well.
I came home and the company I had interviewed for sent me a job offer. We still have to discuss the terms, but I am looking forward to it.
Afterwards I went to Berkeley. I met up with Paul, Michael, and Thomas. We went to the Starry Plough and the Poetry Slam. The show was a lot of fun and we had a really great time. I wasn't sure which poet was the waitress from the Phoenix, but in retrospect I think I know which one it was. I wish I had remembered at the time.
A girl walked by me with a buzz cut. She looked familiar, like the bartender girl who had sung Last Goodbye and White Rabbit to me at the lock-in last August with the Noisettes at the Hotel Utah. Somehow, I found the courage to approach her and ask her if it was her. I even remembered her name. Sure enough, it was her. And she didn't remember me, although she pretended to after I described how we knew each other.
That experience kind of phased me. What's the last time I've felt attracted to a girl I knew? I suppose my willingness to talk to her shows signs of improvement in my confidence. Today I weigh 182. I've lost at least five pounds since I started dieting and exercising a couple weeks ago.
I had another talk with the main funder of the company's project. It was great. He is a member of the EFF. I think I will get along well with these guys; their style is more conservative.
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Posted by Joel
Wed, 10 May 2006 19:52:00 GMT
Yesterday started out with things needing fixing. The laundry machine wasn't working. My PBF feed wasn't properly finding the image. In my attempts to fix it, the "htmltools" library proved itself inadequate at parsing a very simple and correct xhtml string. And a client needed something finished.
Well, I figured out why the laundry machine wasn't working (the lid wasn't closed all the way -- one can only imagine why someone would leave their clothes in the washer soaking in water like this). I let the person's wash cycle finish, waited an hour or so, went down, and they hadn't removed it. So I took their clothes out and put mine in. When I was done, I went to use the dryer, only to find sopping wet clothes in it. I took those out, put my clothes in, did two dry cycles. By the time I was done, neither of the incumbent sets of clothes had been accounted for in any way.
The htmltools library is evidently incapable of parsing xhtml. Perfectly normal and compliant xhtml. Maybe it's meant for html 4, I don't know. Either way, it choked on something there was no good reason to choke on and created a godawful excuse for a tree based on the source string, so I just used the REXML library and that worked fine. The PBF feed now works again.
We watched the Globetrekker episode on the UK. I was tired a lot yesterday. I made plans with my cousin Craig, who I haven't seen in many years, to meet up when he visits San Francisco next week. I made plans to go to LA tomorrow for the weekend and hang out with my brother and spend Sunday with my mom for Mother's Day. I made plans to see the Poetry Slam finalists tonight in Berkeley with Paul.
I took my IRC client off my dock. Good riddance.
The interview went ok. I am ambivalent towards its product. But at least it's not in Soma. The hip Web 2.0 kids were described as "incestuous."
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