The First 48 Hours

Frankly, the last two days could have been one giant one if I had the audacity to sleep at work. Honestly, at the time I'm going back tomorrow, I should have slept there tonight. The last 48 hours have been busy indeed with more than 50% of that time spent on Emerson Street in Palo Alto at my new job.

So I sit here trying to think of what to write about, because my time has mainly consisted of 80% coding, 10% meetings, 5% lunch and 5% for breathing. Contrary to what you might think, I seem to hold the same amount of dedication working on this site as I do with Avalonstar. Also notice that the word "design" is not anywhere in my time matrix at the moment. Let me tell you why.

So without getting into hot water, I can say that the whole team is in panic/lockdown mode. It's not just over a new design either. Lots of new things are on the horizon and should be popping out in the next few weeks. By the time I was hired, version two of the site was already conceptualized and had entered the coding stages. So naturally, that's what I was thrown on the boat to do; transfer that style to all the pages that contained the old style. However, it's not your usual HTML tag party. No, there's a template system involved. Not just any template system, a proprietary PHP one. Forget about Wordpress and MovableType for a second, Aaron (my partner's) system is pretty hardcore and consists of no more than 25 lines of code. If there was a spectrum showing the amount of control given when using any given template system, Aaron's would be as close to total control as you can get. I've gotten used to the system so much that I was actually thinking of converting.

But wait a minute, it gets better. Not only did I have to learn how to use Aaron's template system, I got a crash course in UNIX and Subversion systems (Trac is the same piece of software that the Wordpress Development Team uses.). Note that prior to two days ago. I had never touched UNIX other than to follow tutorials on how to install WordPress on my local machine. Believe me, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I felt pretty weird asking Aaron first grade questions, since he sort of expected me to know my way around PHP and UNIX.

So all the errors, breaking of code, overwriting, committing, status checking and updating aside, it's been more of a learning experience than anything else. At the same time, the fact that I have voluntarily contributed so many hours should convey something positive to my colleagues. Needless to say on the contrary, my client work has taken a hit (and if you're a client of mine and reading this, my apologies in advance.). Things should normalize by the time Jen arrives, but it will be a hard road getting to that point. As a preview, Aaron is leaving the country for a week vacation, so the rookie will be in charge. I'll just try and manage not to get fired by then.