Archive for category work
Inviting the World To Your Parties
Posted by jdodson in Uncategorized, tech, work on October 26th, 2009
Been working quite a bit lately. Been enjoying my work quite a bit lately. Its fun to use something and not only have people use it but use it myself.
dotcal.com needed an invitation system so I built one. I built it into our calendar but I learned a few things from other systems that I took along for the ride. For instance I learned from Google Calendar what I don’t want to do. Currently in Google Calendar if you invite someone to an event nothing tells the person that the event was added to their calendar, it simply was just added silently. I talked to a guy from Google Calendar at the last CalConnect and he said this is a feature. I think this is a bad one as I don’t want events added to my calendar without me knowing about it.
So when we send someone an invitation we actually send an invitation. YOU say if you are going or not and YOU say if your not. It also has the added benefit of letting you know the event is going to happen. I think this is the correct behavior.
dotcal++
An other feature I like is a “Evite” system for invitations. Evite allows anyone to create an account and send invitations to anyone with a email address. Some modern calendar programs don’t allow this as you are REQUIRED to send invitations to people with accounts on the system. dotcal doesn’t require you to send a invitation to ONLY people in our system. I mean how cool would it be for me to send a invitation to a event to someone and I had to rope them into getting a dotcal account. It would suck.
So dotcal not only tells you about a event invitation but it also sends out a invitation evite style allowing the recipient to be whomever they want to. I also added some features I havent seen anywhere else.
Evite sends out a invitation and you can say if you are going or not but it doesn’t allow you to… lets say a week before your Halloween party to send invitations to everyone that hasn’t responded yet. At least if it does, I didn’t see the feature.
dotcal allows three ways to send invitations:
- To everyone on the invites list
- To everyone who hasn’t responded yet
- To everyone you just added to the list
The default is everyone you just added to the list. This is by far the less annoying to the user receiving the invitation.
I have put much love into this system and think its a pretty good one. We have Google Maps integration so the location of the event is easily mappable. You can put a URL in the invitation as well. As the event organizer you can return to a special page to see everyones responses. Invitees can make a note for the event organizer public or private. We support most HTML in the invitation so you can make it pretty.
If you like what you hear, head over to dotcal to check it out. We also do a slew of other things, but ill save that for a future blog post.
And There Was Much Interviewing
Posted by jdodson in informative, work on January 8th, 2009
I have been interviewing potential candidates quite a bit lately. Interviewing over Skype? Check. Impromptu interview with zero prep time? Today check. Having fun because I love interviewing? Double check.
Ive always wanted to interview potential candidates at previous jobs had by attempting and failing to try and coax managers into letting me. Managers I have had usually lump people in categories based on things like age or years of accomplishing certain tasks not immediately related to interviewing. For instance someone may well have worked as a developer at a company for many years and be very good at it but that doesn’t mean they are good at interviewing or actually want to. As if length of stay predetermines you to be good at a given task? Which is part of the reason I love my job at neutralspace so much. They don’t have that philosophy at all. Its the difference between rewards results OR rewarding position/perception.
Ill talk more about it in the days to come, but know for now that I have been interviewing canidates quite a bit and it has been fun. Iits not all roses and candy though… I am in the thick of development and since I am now the only developer we have(long story but ends well) its hard to juggle interviews, admin tasks and hacking out our product. We have some new people in the pipe but that sort of thing doesn’t move as fast as it should.
Building something is exciting when you care about it quite a bit. I have never cared about a company as much as I care about neutralspace. I have also really never had a CEO of a company earn my respect and loyalty before. Respect and admiration is something that is earned and I have never admired a CEO this much. I also am working alongside our project manager and he is also a great guy that I work really well with too. I also work with other amazing people, perhaps some day ill write a bit about them all here.
So I guess all that to say… I really love where I am at and I am enjoying working with people I trust and respect. They really seem to feel the same way about me so its a really great feeling and work environment.
Macbook Pro flies…. with 4 gigs of RAM!
Hi.
Second work week at the new job and its going well. Plenty to keep me busy with. Plenty to think about. Plenty of choices to sift through. Boredom won’t be on my radar for quite some time, if at all really. In the end id rather be nose to the razor busy with tasks than bored.
Recently I noted to the new company that this macbook pro was SLOW on 1G of memory. First time a full gig of memory wasn’t enough for a machine ive used. I think it must be the mac bloat or something. Ive used Ubuntu for years and gotten by fine with a gig or less. Regardless, having only one gig would cause the mac to swap much to disk and thereby make things VERY slow.
Ive found that mac may be a fine desktop OS but not in terms of desktop responsiveness in a low resource state(1 gig of ram it seems). The Linux kernel must kick the Mac OS kernels ass or something, perhaps Gnome as something to do with it as well but Linux can seem to get by on a lesser machine. Not to say this laptop is lesser, its a 2GHZ dual core machine and 1G should have this machine do circles around a jet. Needless to say, thats not the case. I guess its not totally surprising mac really seems to bling out the UI quite a bit. It just comes with the cost of needing more resources available. Compound that with the fact that I am a power user and virtualize a few instances at once and it might make more sense.
All that said I purchased 4 gigs of ram for this machine and it flies. Initial startup is slow but once everything is loaded its fast. One thing operating systems do to “fake out” that they booted ultra fast is get the window manager loaded and still boot up the rest of the OS. This basically makes the first minute or so of login slower than it should be. Id honestly prefer to login when everything is finished loading. I guess games need to be played with peoples minds about how fast an OS actually boots up so one OS doesn’t look bad. Linux is starting to do this more, so I guess since everyone is doing it….
So there you have it, for power use, Mac OS seems good around 4 gigs. Which is nut bag insane.
Pretty meet price.
**UPDATE** 4 gigs of RAM cost $89.
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As you have noticed I have started the blogging cycle again. I have generally enjoyed blogging and decided to start this up again because of many new changes going on in the world of all things jdodson.
The biggest news is that I have secured a new job in Portland. One bad thing about my old job at Dotster was the commute. It was 2 hours one way making for a long 4 hour daily commute. I don’t mind riding the bus but the trips home were becoming quite hard to do. I would say that was the biggest “life reason” for leaving Dotster. Id say the other reasons are varied.
Many weeks ago I was called by a friend I used to work with at OpenSourcery. She mentioned there was a new company in need of a developer with my skills. They were looking for someone who was creative, smart, a self starter, thinks “outside the box” and more. It sounded like a good idea so we started talking. Fast forward to now and the job is all squared away. I am not going to talk much about what the do now we can get into that later. Some parts I can’t talk about due to NDA’s but when we are ready to let the world know ill send a few words here about it.
My last two weeks at Dotster was the best time I have ever had leaving a company. I have never left a company and was inclined to return at some point in the future. Dotster was a class act all the way and I really thank them for the last few weeks being so great and my time spent with them in general. I learned quite a bit from them in terms of business and business attitudes and from a more development centric perspective, learned quite a bit about proving new ground in development while thinking about “legacy code.” One thing I have come to understand is that “legacy code” can really bind you but you can be forward thinking if the powers that be elect you the chance.
In general all my other quips about Dotster they seemed to be addressing on my departure. I have never seen a company really take its developers to heart as much as they did during my last few weeks. I feel really good about the direction they are going and feel really good about development at Dotster. So much so I could really see myself returning at some point.
Francesca and I are taking the next few days off and because of that I may indeed blog more.