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Now playing: Sixx:A.M. - Life is Beautiful (3:35)

Today, I am embarking on a new adventure. Yesterday was my final day with my previous employer, and today I'm working full time on a new endeavor. Unfortunately I can't share what I'm working on yet, but here's a few details about what I'm doing.

First of all, the company I work for today is a small startup based in the San Francisco bay area. No, I haven't moved out there, I am still based in Houston. I do all of my work remotely, contacting the team via Skype or phone. This alone is exciting. I mostly get to set my own hours and working schedule. Today I was up by 9 AM, and began to be productive fairly quickly. No more commuting or having to "get ready for work". I just get up and start. It's quite awesome.

Secondly, I'm delving out of my comfort zone. My previous two jobs involved the .Net Framework, with a lot of that work in ASP.Net. This project has me working largely with JavaScript, relying on some cutting-edge features from HTML5 and CSS3. Oh yeah, and the back end is in PHP. Talk about stepping out. The last couple of times I got tangled up in PHP I was working with Cute Trance Girls and Trax in Space 2. (No, this isn't another music site. I gave up on that a while ago, remember?) Prior to that it was a failed project run by a guy that had no idea how to code, only how to sell stuff. Here, I pretty much own the PHP coding process, and it has been far more rewarding than any previous endeavor involving PHP.

Finally, I am working with people who love what they're doing. The team is sold on the concept, and the level of excitement about what we're doing is incredibly high. I am hoping that this excitement translates to an awesome product.

Speaking of the product, we are hoping to have a beta out by the end of May, so hopefully by then I'll be able to tell a little more about who we are and what we are doing. We're still kind of in stealth mode, so we've got to keep what we're doing under the radar.

Until then, I think it's time to take my place on the couch with DarkSide and get to work.

Labels: Life, PHP, Sift

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Yet Another Update
Posted: 9:24:00 PM 0 comments

For a few days at least, I'm going to be able to get back to doing some of my projects. I think the one thing I really want to work on right now is OSMusic, because it's just dead right now. It kills me that such a potentially valuable resource could go so unused. I'm hopefully going to get the projects off the ground to be able to add that for the December update, while fixing some bugs and planning the next community feature.

I'm not going to have a good handle on projects as a whole for a while, because I've been away from them for so long. I'll probably spend tomorrow planning everything out and getting all of the ideas ready to implement so that I can finally make some progress on the things I want to do.

I've turned in my resignation for Westwood One, as I've got a new job coming up at US Interactive, a company that does online defensive driving courses. They use ASP.Net, and I'm really excited to finally be able to get into .Net professionally. This starts shortly after Thanksgiving.

I'm mulling heading to San Francisco next weekend to meet up with Saurin. We've got something going on that I'm pretty excited about, and I think it would be a great opportunity to nail some stuff down development-wise with him. He wants to do some coding, and now that I've got a pretty good idea as to how we're going to set stuff up, we're ready to move forward with actually developing things. We'll be using PHP, so there's going to be a small learning curve.

Speaking of PHP, the question of whether PHP v. ASP.Net is still up in the air. Both perform well, but we decided on PHP because of the dollar amount. It doesn't look like it's going to be too bad for me, it's very C-like in syntax, and we have another developer on board who knows a lot about PHP.

And I'm happy to say that all that stress from September and October has vanished with the wind. There have been a number of reasons why my stress level has been so high, and most of them were work related. Now that Westwood One's out of the picture, I feel like a new person.

Labels: Coding, Life, OSMusic.Net, PHP, Projects, San Francisco, US Interactive

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

ASP.Net v. PHP
Posted: 12:30:00 PM 0 comments

Last night, I was presented with a challenge, or what I consider to be a challenge anyway. The question was raised as to whether or not large websites that have hundreds of thousands to millions of users will scale better in Windows/IIS/MySQL/ASP.Net or Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP.

Scalability is, in essence, the ability for a solution to still apply to a problem even when the problem is very large. There are piles and piles of articles on how to scale both ASP.Net and PHP, so to me, scalability itself is not an issue.

Performance, however, is directly linked to scalability, because if you have poor performance on a website, you'll be eating up cash throwing hardware at your setup. You have to have good performance, or else you'll end up in trouble.

So this really brings the question down to which performs better, ASP.Net or PHP? It's a question I don't know the answer to, because I don't know a thing when it comes to PHP. Analysis on the web is often biased, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

Thus the challenge in my mind: prove beyond a doubt that one platform is going to be better than the other. Needless to say that is what I'm going to be spending my upcoming days doing. It'll be interesting to see which platform wins.

Labels: ASP.Net, Coding, PHP