As far as work goes, things have been going really well. I have a project that I can close out for the most part, and another few that I get to introduce to my replacement and get him in the swing of things. Also, I have a great independent gig right now that is great. I am so very great full for everything that I have learned here at the university both in terms of technical skills and real life experience knowing how an office works and what to expect.

As I move on, I will always have this job to look back at that prepared me for future employment and the people that helped me get to this stage in my life. I am sure that I wouldn’t be the same person if I hadn’t worked here.

On a final note, I would like to say congratulations to two of my colleagues who both have received great jobs for after the semester is over. Congrats guys, I wish you both the best.

The moral of why I am talking about this however is that I am having a hard time finding a job in web development. I can find gigs just fine, but I want to find a company where I don’t have to go through the process of finding a gig every few weeks or months just to keep working and this is the problem that I am running into. I guess I just have to continue putting myself out there and hope that I can find something that I want to do.

The city of Buenos Aires is a great place. Our hotel was located in one of the best parts of town. We were about a block away from this huge obelisk that is the centre of most of the celebrations that happen in the city. This was especially nice during new years eve. We got to celebrate new years eve on a balcony of the hotel where we could see this obelisk. When midnight hit, we all went down to the obelisk and sang by it. This was a great time and one of the locals recorded our singing and we found it on youtube when we got back.

Besides the place we got to stay, we also got to sing in quite a few unique environments. The first was in la Catedral de la Plata in la Plata just outside of Buenos Aires. This was a very interesting place to sing because the ceiling was so tall that we had about a 3 second delay from when we would sing to when the sound would get back to us.

Overall, it was a very great trip and an experience of a life time. I am back at work now, and have been working on a few interesting things lately. I got to work with my first mailer for an application this week. All I have to say is that making a mailer with Ruby on Rails is a lot easier than I would have expected a mailer to be. All it really is, is you design the mail as an html document, and just use that as the body of you email which is extremely easy. Then, writing the code to call the mailer is very simple as well. In the future, when I hear I need to make a mailer, I will not worry about it because it is quite easy.

My next interesting thing that I get to work with that I haven’t used before is exporting data from an application to an Excel spreadsheet. From looking at what I have to do, this looks like it will be easier than I thought as well. Lately, it seems to be a trend with Ruby on Rails that I always over exaggerate how hard something will be, and it almost always ends up being easier that I would have expected. I think that is mainly due to the language, but I would assume that part of it has to do with my newer ability to trust myself while coding now. That has been one of my flaws for a while. Lately however, I have found that if I am confident and ask for help when I am stuck on something everything works out better for all parties involved. I am glad that I finally started to learn this and get over my timid approach to coding that I used to have.

The other thing that I have been learning lately, especially with projects, is that every issue can be in one of three different categories. They can either be something you can plan for, something you should have planned for, or something that you couldn’t have planned for. I have had a lot of these issues come up lately. First off, I have gotten ahead of some issues, but asking myself, and then the client, what happens in case A, or is this situation ever possible. Those types of questions have been helping focus how one of the projects I have been working on have been going. I have been able to figure out the scope of this project earlier, so I don’t end up doing extraneous things that aren’t needed.

The other type of situation, those you should have planned for is something that I have been noticing with a project that I am working on that is nearing completion. There are a few things that have come up in meetings, where we both looked at each other, and were confused about how something was working, and it ended up being an earlier miscommunication and if I would have at that time, asked about specific edge cases like I am now doing with the newer project I am working on, these problems would not have come up. This was a failure on my part that I have learned from that has helped me a lot.

Lastly, there are those cases that you can’t plan for. These are the situations that are never fun to see. The other day, I was out at a clients, installing the completed version of a project for them, and an issue with the password for their local database had been recently changed, so the program wasn’t able to connect to it as desired. This wasn’t a hard thing to fix, but it was an example of one of those issues that was thought should be fine, as the database was used, and it was shown working to us, where something as obscure as the password being changed so the connection wasn’t getting made wasn’t something we had thought of, and the fact that it was a local database meant that the password that was used previously to connect would just get changed. This is an example of my least favourite issues, the one that shows up while you are trying to show your product, but at the same time, these are the issues that I don’t mind dealing with. I like thinking on my feet, and figuring things out while the pressure is on, is something I would like to say I am great at, and I feel it really makes me use those critical thinking skills that sometimes like to try and hide away.

Anyway, That is what I have been doing in the last month or so. Over the next few weeks I will be heading down to Argentina and Uraguy, so expect an update after I get back, but probably not one before I leave.

Otherwise, I am working on preparing for my concert on Friday. I have one song yet that I need to perfect my memorization of, but other than that, I think things will go well. After that, I will be touring next Wednesday through Friday with the same choir around to different high schools in Wisconsin which will be a blast also.

With work, I have been working on a new project while finishing up details with the previous one I have been working on that is almost done. Having the experiance of starting a project from scratch, being allowed to make it my own has been really rewarding for me. Anyway, I need to get going, as I have a lot of stuff to finish up today before the day it done, and there are only so many hours left.

In between my bouts of singing lately, I have been doing some awesome things at work. The huge project that I have been working on for a while has the potential to be done very soon and I know I am not the only one that is happy for this. While working on trying to finish up that project, I have been working on my skills in problem solving. We have been finding other small issues with this program, and have been trying to figure out those interesting solutions because we are trying to get things done. Now, I am not saying that we are copping out and finding the quick fix answers. I am saying that we are running into those issues that normally you say hey, I know how to do this, but this wasn’t something that we thought of at the beginning of the project, but now, you have the majority of the project up and running, how do I implement this without changing the majority of things that have been finished. So, that has been interesting lately.

Also, I have gotten a new, from the void, project which I have been waiting for. I haven’t really had a project that I got to start and finish by myself yet at work, they have all been other projects that people have worked on doing maintenance, or continuing development from where they left off. Well, I shall let you know how that project will be treating me in a few weeks.

As for school, I have my first CS assignment due. It was to implement and mirror a Linux shell for the most part. The project turned out to be quite interesting. We had to demo the project today, and we did pretty well, and were satisfied with our results. That is what has been happening with me the last few weeks.

As of right now, 10ish AM, I still have to decide what I want to talk about. This isn’t due to the fact that I am a slacker, or lazy, this is due to the fact that I have a bunch of things that I want to talk about, and I need to narrow it down. At first, I wanted to show people how quick and easy it is to get a simple project up and running. I don’t think I am going to do this because it has been shown a few times in talks in classes to some of the possible new members. Next, it was suggested that I do a talk about HAML because as you have seen, I have taken a pretty solid look at it. I don’t think I am going to do this because there are so many new people that might be coming to the meeting this evening. So, I think I am going to just talk about what I like about ruby, what I do with it on a daily basis, and why I enjoy using it so much. I think this is a good topic because this way, I can still show enthusiasm while not feel like I am either talking down, or over, someones head. This way I can just talk to them, and explain my experiences with it instead of trying to teach, which can be done at a meeting later, when we know who is interested in what topics.

I got another client for a project that my Senior Software Engineering class is working on, and we had our first meeting yesterday. Everything went beautifully, and we know exactly what we expect of each other. So, things have been going well for me as of late, and I will be updating this once a week again starting now as I have found some time.

First off, I learned how to do file upload with rails. To do this, I used a plug in called paperclip. It was quite easy, and straight forward to use. I wouldn’t imagine about how to do it without such a plugin. What paperclip does, is it takes multiple pieces of information from the file, in my case it was an image, and saves them all separately, but allows you to refer to a single object instead of all of the individual pieces.

Besides file upload, I also learned how to do authtication with a CAS (Central Authentication System). It was quite easy as well. I used a plugin for doing this also. (It seems to be a trend lately, and also a very nice way to learn how to do something without banging your head against the wall) The plugin that I used was one written by my boss for doing exactuly what I needed to do.

Now, being as I had never written a plug-in before, I did get a bit of help with it. So, my boss and one of my co-workers did a lot to help me with writing this plugin, but now that I have one down, if the need for another should arise, I have a much better understanding of how to go about it.

Well, I shall make the bloggers promise finally now, as most people assumed I would. I shall update my blog much more often than what has happened previously.

Also, if you want to take a look at the plug-in, and give me feedback, or have any ideas of how to expand it feel free. The plugin can be found here.