Ben Benner’s Blog

But counting in a good way.

I thought about having the title for this post be “23 days and the grass is still greener”, but I didn’t want to start this post out on an implied negative tone. (Notably, I might have just planted that seed by referencing, what I wasn’t going to do, but let’s gloss over that for now.)

If by chance you have a keen eye, you will notice that is a Jaduka business card on my desk. I had a few in my laptop bag and needed to ’shim’ up my laptop and monitor as to level out things.

I had to count up the number of days on the job here at Unwired, as I haven’t been keeping track really. I cannot get into details about everything that I have been working on, NDAs and all, but needless to say I am enjoying myself. I have been having the opportunity to do what I love best, a little bit of everything.

I have done some coding, some writing (documentation), some product management, systems architecting, some server configuration tweaking, chair assembly (bought myself a chair from IKEA).

I have learned that every Tuesday is ‘Chicken Day’, no not a day where we all run in fear and hide, but a day that we celebrate our victory over the chickens in that great war that no one seems to recall. Chicken Day is celebrated at Pluckers, where they serve up the losers of the great war in a variety of fashions.

(Note: While the back-story on this sounds like something I might have come up with in High School, no this is not my storyline, this is the story as it has been told to me by Jim, one of my new co-workers.)

Wednesday’s is sometimes referred to as ‘Taco Day’ or just “Maudie’s Day (but not fancy Maudie’s on 360, the other one, you know on Lamar”. There is no fabled war to speak of in terms of Taco Day, just good Mexican food.

I like to think that I am fitting in well with my new co-workers, this change in jobs for me is made a little bit easier than I think most folks find a change of company, as I met most of the folks I am working with a few years back and have run into them at social gatherings since that time.

Unwired is in the Austin Tech Incubator, which is part of The University of Texas, the building we are in is technically an university building, which is one of the reasons I bought my own chair, the ones they have here are not that great and considering I have been spending 8-12 hours a day sitting in it, I wanted something that would be kind to me and not break the bank.

I sit down the hall from the rest of the crew, but I have stocked my office with snacks and sodas, so I get the occasional visitor who has come to snag a soda or talk about something related to the current project.

For the first week or so I did not have my ID, which meant that I had to sign-in with the front-desk guy, Mark. Mark was very nice during the whole ordeal, but me not having my ID for a week, definitely seemed to bug him, as he asked me about it every day.

When the day finally came for me to get my ID, I headed downtown to campus had my picture taken (I think it is fine, but I have been told I made a dumb face) and grabbed lunch with Jeremy, who works downtown. I had the chance to see his office, he works for FGSQUARED, they are located on 6th St about two blocks west of I-35. After that, I have been able to come and go from the building at will, is a nice feeling.

This past weekend Jeremy and I knocked out a quick little coding contract, the gig was to build a couple of IVR call flows using Twilio, these call flows were interactive and used the database of the rest of the project that a former co-worker is building. After I hear that the site has gone live, I will post a note about what the site is, but until then, mums the word. The first call flow was pretty easy and we got that finished up pretty quick, the 2nd one took a bit longer to do (which is understandable as it had more functionality/logic to it).

We got stuck on the way in which Kohana 3 handles ‘routing’ vs the way Kohana 2 handles it. (Jeremy is the Kohana expert between the two of us, so I helped as much as I could, but it was him that got it working in the end.) But that isn’t to say we missed any deadlines, having lots of experience doing estimates for call flows, I made sure to estimate time in there for integration testing and tweaking. I had spent some time Friday night getting familiar with the site’s database and some of the code structure, practiced setting it up on my local dev box and then on our Server Beach server. The coding was pretty much all knocked out on Saturday. I made a few edits on Sunday, as I tweaked verbiage here and there, while writing up some documentation for the project manager on the gig.

It was fun, I definitely would like to do a couple of small coding contracts per month. The extra money is nice, but nothing I will get rich from, a big part of it is the chance to practice my coding on stuff that isn’t my day job, you know the ‘ever learning’ type of approach.

I definitely would like to do some more Twilio oriented projects, I think my years of experience at Jaduka, NetworkIP and Simplified have given me a significant amount of invaluable experience in designing good user-experience for telephone based interactive applications and helps me to figure out what the test scenarios are for that type of thing easily (almost like second nature).

I do wish the Twilio Text-to-Speech was a little bit better, at Jaduka we had licensed a TTS engine that was good and not too expensive, but for an implementation like Twilio’s, the cost would likely be prohibitive to implement, but then again if one is REALLY concerned about quality, then you pay for the professionally recorded prompts, so I can appreciate Twilio offering TTS that is not the best sounding in the world, because the offer the option to use professionally recorded prompts as well (you must get them recorded yourself.)

Well I best get back to it.

bdbenner programming, work contract, Jaduka, job, programming, twilio, unwired, work

I have gone back and forth on what to title this blog post on for a couple of days now and I think that this is the most fitting, though it is pretty much just an inside joke, some folks might recognize this type of reference from various TV shows that used it as a means to describe how a character just up and disappeared one day.

Jeremy and I used to say it to one another whenever some problem came up that just was so frustrating (particularly because the problem at hand shouldn’t be difficult or flat out just shouldn’t exist), one of us would look over and say “I’m going for cigarettes.” and the other might reply with “Bring me back some gum.” or maybe “Your coming back right?”

Well, on Monday (5/10/2010) I gave my two weeks notice. Throughout the following days I spoke with various coworkers, some of them are surprised, some of them saw it coming, all of them have congratulated me.

I have to say that I am looking forward to working at Unwired Nation, I have known the founders there for quite a while. I believe we were first introduced back in 2005. I ran into them on a couple of occasions at developer conferences and from time-to-time down at the Austin Tech Happy Hour.

The details of my tenure and subsequent departure require many beers to try and follow the overall time-line, but I have been near NetworkIP (my now former employer) for almost 12 years, yes TWELVE years, working directly for 7 years).

I originally set out from Michigan to work for a company known as Simplified Telesys, a software vendor to NetworkIP. I spent the first two weeks of working for Simplified at NetworkIP’s offices in Longview, TX.

I believe that I only missed one NetworkIP x-mas party since 1998 (Simplified was a very close vendor, so NetIP was kind enough to allows us attend their parties).

I joined NetworkIP as an employee in November of 2003 and have worked on various projects and for the PrivateTel and Jaduka subsidiaries. There is a part of me that will miss this place, but I am definitely looking forward to new challenges.

With that abridged version of history, leaving NetworkIP is sort of like leaving my first career job, as many of the folks that I met and worked with 12 years ago are the same folks that I have been working with the last few months, the titles and responsibilities have changed, but the same folks nevertheless.

My last day at NetworkIP will be Friday, May 21st. I have been trying to figure out where my going away lunch should be, I am leaning towards burgers and bowling at Highland lanes.

I start with Unwired Nation on Monday, May 24th.

In the meantime, I have to get back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner Uncategorized i quit, Jaduka, job, moving on, networkip, unwired nation

… the more they stay the same.

Let’s see, updates on what has been going on.

1) The Benner family has gotten a new bunny. I am not referring to Zoe, who joined the family back in June. I am referring to ‘Wash’, yup his name is Wash. Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of Wash, but Gina has been snapping plenty of photos.

2) Gina got an early X-mas gift. She got a Canon Rebel EOS XSi. She has long been into photography, but her old 35mm Canon cameras need to be repaired. You might think that the reason I got her a digital is purely due to my love of technology, it is not purely due to my love of technology. She has really liked her digital cameras in the past and has scanned several pictures for web posting or reprinting. It just seemed like the best logical progression.

(note: Gina will tell you that I also got it for her, so that she would have a hobby. I prefer to think of it in terms of helping her find a creative outlet, mine lately is bread.)

3) I got a Mac. John bought a new Mac Pro (desktop) and cut me a great deal on his old 13″ Mac Book Pro. I have made the conversion from my HP laptop to the Mac. There are A LOT of things that I like (Exposé for instance - it is FANTASTIC) , but there are some thing that I am still getting used to. Like the fact that the ‘control’ key doesn’t do anything I want it to do anymore, meaning I have not yet finished the training myself to use the ‘command’ key yet.

4) Work has been extremely busy. There has been the normal fare, the day-to-day stuff that always takes up time. But we have also been knocking out a few new things here and there. One of our customer’s Oddcast had us work with them on a project for Whataburger. If you are from/in Texas then you definitely know the name, from what I am told other southern states have this unique burger chain as well, but anyone from Michigan will likely be a bit clueless.

The Whataburger project itself is a variation on a few different projects we have done for Oddcast in the past, but there was a spark of genius in the way in which we implemented this project that I hope to leverage for all future projects like it, in terms of fluidity and efficiency I would dare say that the underlying work represents a 10x increase in both areas. That project launched on Nov 9th and runs until Dec 21st, which reminds me the entire dev team will be heading to Whataburger to get ourselves an A1 Thick and Hearty Burger here either on Friday or Monday.

With the new team that I have assembled to work on web applications for the parent company, we launched a new web app for a customer. Unfortunately, I cannot state who that customer is at this time. I do want to note that Kevin and Daniel (the two senior developers on the team) played a big part in completing this project for a timely launch. We have found (and corrected) some bugs here and there, which is to be expected with as quickly as we rushed it into production. But along the way we have also made some enhancements that I feel really proud of. We will be re-using parts of what we have done on other parent company projects in the future.

The other notable project/product that we have been working has recently launched a pilot with a retailer that I think everyone would know the name of, but at least right now I cannot state who that retailer is. The product is CommentFunnel. (Jaduka blog post)

We took some of the telephony tech that we had created for Oddcast in the past and reworked it a little bit here and there to allow for a comment recorded by a customer can be immediately be emailed to the store’s management and we also provide a dashboard that allows for reporting and reviewing comments right on the web. As we move beyond the pilot phase we will be upgrading the telephony and the web aspects of CommentFunnel. We will look to add in text (sms) messaging for mobile couponing and look at transcription technologies to allow us to make the audio comments searchable.

5) I fixed Gina’s big red chair. Had I not lost the IKEA receipt for the chair, this item would read ‘I got a replacement for Gina’s big red chair.’ The Chair’s ’spring’ supports had broken away from the frame, causing you to sink into the chair. After much contemplation (which sounds better than, ‘I was being lazy’), I finally devised a solution for the chair. A square piece of 1/2″ plywood, some metal ‘L’ brackets, many wood screws, my trusty Black&Decker drill, some muslin and my Powershot staple gun. After a couple of hours in the garage, the chair was ready to be put back into the living room. I used the muslin and staple gun to replace the fabric covering the bottom of the chair, and unfortunately hiding my handy work.

I am sure there are mundane things that I could list out here, but I will leave that for another blog post.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner apple, gina, mac, work bunny, commenfunnel, gina, Jaduka, mac, oddcast, update, whataburger, work