Pocket Revolutionary

I am a PHP programmer. I have been a PHP programmer for most of a decade. My license plate says “PHP DEV”, and I have PHPUnit tattooed on my arm (in Kanji). It is with that overly-defensive attitude that I must admit the inevitable: my latest project is in Ruby.

Shock. Awe. I know. It was an easy decision based on the server stack we were running, our growth plans, and the fact that we needed to train intern developers with a very quick turnaround. We went with the sexy newcomer, but that’s not the interesting story. The interesting part is that it wasn’t a big deal at all. With good frameworks, it didn’t really matter what language we chose.

Part of the reason that I love frameworks so much is that dropping from CakePHP to Ruby on Rails is a syntactical change and not a process change. In a way, frameworks are just enforced design patterns (MVC, mostly, in my case). Plus, playing with a different language after all this time away has been great experience. This jaunt into the land o’ pure object-oriented madness and strict coding rules has made my PHP coding (especially CakePHP) better. I have new appreciation for fat models and thin controllers, and I throw in the ternary operator more often. On top of that, I’m getting to teach people (like my friend Neil) who have never really done web development on this level. Through teaching others about MVC architectures, I’ve gotten better.

So, I’m still a PHP developer. It’s the basis for 80% of my work projects and all of my freelancing.
I’m having fun, though, on the other side. Stretching my PHP skills, adding to my toolbox, and remembering that I was just a better programmer when I couldn’t rely on ten-year old knowledge.

Our dog is not a workaholic. Aingeal (our aforementioned pet) has a very important job at our house: keep pre-pubescent boys and harmless animals away from our fence. Our dog loves everybody to a the point of being pathetic, but she knows she must be eternally vigilant to keep our house safe from neighbors and cats. This is not just her job; it is her passion. Still, she knows when it’s time to work and when it’s time to relax. Aingeal has the best work/life balance in our house. So, I’ve learned four things from her example.
Things I’ve learned from Aingeal:

1. She has a den. When it’s all just too much activity, she hides in the back of our closet to get some much needed alone time.
2. She naps. If she’s tired and there’s nothing exciting happening, she takes the opportunity to recharge before the evening shift.
3. She keeps a schedule. We may not always appreciate her schedule, but she tries to be consistent (when we don’t mess it up with our own late nights).
4. She spends time with the family. Every evening, she makes time to sit directly on our laps or at least push us off the couch when necessary.

We’re still adding notes, videos, photos, and articles to our little Echo blog over at http://echo.marketingdilemma.com.

(via Phil Cooke)

I write status reports. At times, I write great status reports. My status reports inspire envy, and I send a new one out every single week. Unfortunately, my well-thought-out, expository reports only appease my bosses for 2-3 days. At some point during the week, at the most inopportune time available, I’ll hear “what’s the status on… ?” Sometimes it’s right after lunch or a 9am wake-up call after coding until 3am. Either way, it’s not when I have trusty notes at hand and my mind draws a blank. It doesn’t matter how current the information on Basecamp is (Basecamp is 37 Signal’s project management webapp), because that’s for the team. My bosses don’t check Basecamp for status (or need to); they ask their managers (like me) what is going on.

Okay, so I have to give a quick status report, and that should be no big deal. The problem is I unwittingly run a “black box” operation. I’m borrowing this term from Merlin Mann (see the slide), but the idea is that my job is viewed from the outside as thus: requests, deadlines, emails and other stuff people understand go in, I do whatever I’m paid to do, and results come out. Whatever I’m actually doing between the request and the result is in the “black box” where nobody really wants to see exactly what I’m doing or how, they’re just patiently waiting at the other end for the results. This means I can’t just spit out the last thing I was working on (e.g. Refactoring the Authorize.net component to abstract response handling into the main order controller) or give a thirty-minute diatribe on PHP frameworks. I need to say something concise (my boss is busy), meaningful (no jargon), and not over-simplified (he’s not stupid, either).

So, I have created the Elevator Pitch Status Report. The “elevator pitch” is what entrepreneurs like to talk about. It’s what you can say about your current idea in the span of an elevator ride (maybe 30 seconds). For the purpose of my status report, though, that’s about as much information I can instantly recall without Basecamp, OmniFocus, or Moleskine in hand, and it keeps me from ad-libbing into techno-babble.Throwing around technical jargon may work to get me out of a question I don’t want to answer, but it doesn’t make my boss know that everything is under control and all is right with the world. At the same time, I try not talk down to anybody and give the anti-social geek answer: “Fixing stuff”. So, after each major task, I try to update my mental 30-second status report. I just ask myself the four secret questions that are all really behind the status request and memorize the answers.

• What is the current sub-project? (Designing the pages, creating shipping calculations, etc.)
• What is the last task I actually did?
• How did that move us along the timeline?
• Has the timeline changed?