23 days and counting
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.