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Reinvent--; DonatGroup++

January 31, 2008 05:14 +0000  |  Drupal Employment Perl Reinvent Work [at] Play 8

Those of you who aren't privy to my less-than-public posts, you might wonder what the heck happened to Reinvent and why I'm suddenly talking about The Donat Group. Obviously, it's probably a Bad Idea to talk about the nuts and bolts of it all publically, but here's the gist in my generation's favourite format: point form.

  • Reinvent is a fun company with lots of smart people
  • It's also run by management that feels that expanding their business into Software patents makes for an acceptable business model.
  • I disagreed. I've worked for a lot of companies who did things I felt were Not Good, but there are a few things I won't do... supporting software patents is one of them.
  • So I went looking for a company whose morals where more in tune with my own and I found one in The Donat Group.
  • I handed in my resignation, offered to work 2weeks before I left and they declined. I guess the brass weren't happy with me.
  • I started at Donat today and they seem pretty cool. Very dot.com startup-like but with actual paying clients.
  • They like Drupal though, which from what I've seen, is really not good. My first impressions of Drupal is that it's a bunch of non-programmers pretending that they can write real software. Function and variable names bleeding into everything else, no objects, and horror of all horrors: their coding standard requires a two-space indent.

I made a work around for the back-assward indenting thing though. I call it undrupal. Basically it uses a regular expression to strip out the space-based indents and replace them with tabs. Then you can write your code in a sane environment, then use the same script to re-crazy it with spaces again.

Ok, so my first day didn't exactly have me neck-deep in super-advanced code, but hey, it's the first day. I'm really looking forward to this job though, the boss is pretty cool and his politics are more in line with my own, and even more fun is the fact that I'm now labled "Senior Developer" and I'll be able to actually head up new projects and such.

That's it for me now. If you want more details, just gimme a call.

Setting up and Showing Around

January 08, 2008 06:21 +0000  |  Reinvent Vancouver 5

Setting up and Showing Around

I've got a lot to recap here, so this might be a bit long. Basically, I've slowly been putting a life together out here and as always, life has been getting in the way.

Soomi & Apple on Granville Island

I'll start with a big public thanks for the Christmas present I received from Stephen, a book from very talented Canadian author Chris Turner called Geography of Hope: A Guided Tour of the World We Need. The guy's also a former Shift Magazine contributor, a publication while no longer in existence has always held a soft spot in my heart. Turner's articles especially were the highlight of my short-lived subscription with Shift and I'm excited to dive into my new hardcover.

Shawna & Quatchi

For those of you who've been asking... constantly, the new job looks good so far. As previously stated, the view from my desk is incredible -- a 180° view of Coal Harbour including the north shore and Canada Place. The code I'm to work on is... well it's not what I was hoping, but there's hope, and there's a lot of promising stuff to come. This week I'm due to start work on their widgetting system and for the most part I'll be playing with nifty stuff like Ajax with Jquery and a new module called flot which is SUPER COOL. Generally, I'm mostly pleased with my decision.

The new apartment is shaping up nicely. There are a few oddities with it's construction though. The placement of light switches and inappropriate position for closet hanging rods vs. shelves etc. The landlord has promised to fix the latter though so I'm still quite happy.

The housewarming went off beautifully, though the presence of a few was missed. Guests arrived and left in waves so the party was always attended but never too crowded. Poesy and Paula went all out and made a series of home made dishes for the event and some people came from as far as Abbotsford and Langley so I was very happy with the result. I also had a couple surprise guests: Soomi and Apple. Soomi, Apple, and Sumi

You might remember Soomi and Apple from my time in Yeosu, Korea. They're friends of Shawna's who helped take care of me in such a foreign place and now that they've accompanied Shawna to Canada for a few weeks, it was my chance to return the favour. Originally under Shawna's care, she had to rush off to Manitoba for a family emergency and so she left them with me. I do, after all, live in Vancouver which is far more fun and interesting than Langley :-)

We spent most of the weekend sightseeing: Science World (not The Telusphere, wtf were they thinking?) and Granville Island made up the first day and Sunday was reserved for Victoria. More than 10years ago I went to there and after being stranded on that rock over night due to the ridiculous ferry hours, I swore I would never return... I blame Shawna for putting the idea in their little Korean heads...

Soomi & Apple in front of the little castle in Victoria

For the not-of-Vancouver-folk, Victoria is the tiny little government town on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. In terms of geography, it's south of the U.S. boarder and of Vancouver but if one wanted to, you could quite easily build a bridge from Vancouver to Victoria much like the one to Prince Edward Island... but such a bridge does not exist. Instead, in order to get from the largest city in B.C. to the second largest city, you must:

  1. Bus from Burrard Station (downtown) to the Ladner exchange (in the middle of nowhere)
  2. Bus from Ladner Exchange to the Tsawassen Ferry Terminal (way out in the middle of nowhere)
  3. Wait for the ferry (runs every hour)
  4. Ferry roughly 1.5hours to the NORTHERN TIP of Vancouver Island (still the middle of nowhere).
  5. Bus 1.5hours in a zig-zag fashion from the North end of the island to the south where the people live.

So it's roughly 5hours by bus to get to downtown Victoria, 2hours in town to see a castle and then in order to avoid the chance of getting stuck there (and missing work Monday morning) we had to leave by PCL bus ($37.50 guarantees that you'll make it to the ferry on time and you won't have to transfer twice through Ladner back out to Vancouver.). The whole gruelling event cost about $50.00 each and about 12hours of our day... I blame Shawna :-P

When Monday rolled around, I went to work and left my keys with the girls to find their way around town, then we met up after work and we went to my grandparent's house for dinner. Everyone seemed to enjoy the company (and the food) and Trish, Shawna's sister (who is even cooler now than I remember) gave me a ride back to the Skytrain where I'm writing this... I might even get to sleep before midnight.

Employed!

December 05, 2007 05:17 +0000  |  Reinvent 5

So after much stress in deciding where to go, I decided to take the job at Reinvent Technology based mostly on their awesome work environment and friendly people. The job looks promising and it's an area of the industry that I've never played with before so it should be fun.

I start January 2nd though, so that means that I have just under a month to (a) find a place to live downtown, and (b) move all of my stuff from the parent's place in the Okanogan down here. Given that it's likely to be a move through the snow-filled mountains, I'm thinking a professional moving company rather than just me renting a truck, though it depends on the costs.

For now though, I've taken the day off. I geeked out for much of the day, so that tomorrow I can get up early and go apartment hunting. If anyone sees something downtown in the range of $1000 - $1200 per month with in suite laundry please let me know eh?