A Day in a Web-Devs Life-2010

Today my post will be a bit different. I normally don’t talk much about work on my personal blog for various reasons. One of which being that I live in a right to hire state and include a link to my blog in my email signature. I also link to this blog’s RSS feed from several locations within our companies intranet. So you can see why I am leery to post about anything work related. I must apologize for its length and lack of direction but I felt that it needed to be documented since I use this blog as a journal of sorts. With that out of the way I would like to give you a taste of my work life.

I start my days around 5:00 each morning the first thing I reach for is my Iphone to check on emails and tweets that may have happened throughout the night. I then head downstairs and get ready for the workday so I don’t wake the wife and Daniel (They are not morning people). Once ready I check my phone again as I am about to leave Wi-Fi access for at least a 30 minute drive. I live in Madison, NC and work in Greensboro. My drive depends heavily on traffic and weather, leaving at 5:30 or 6:00AM normally get’s me to work in about 30 minutes.

Once I arrive at work I grab for a MT. Dew and unlock my machine… I never reboot my machine unless there are windows updates so it is always ready to go and set to where I left off the day before. My programs that are running upon startup normally consist of Chrome, Tweetdeck, Outlook, Flash, and Visual Studio… depending on my work the day before I may have SQL or a spreadsheet open.

Again I check email and twitter to see if anything has gone on during my drive that I need to react to. I then check my task list which is a SharePoint calendar with some extra columns for priority, comments, and requestor to see what task I need to work on next. I switch between my task list and my dry-erase board depending on my workload as I have found under heavy loads the dry-erase board made me more productive. I normally use my task list however. Having just checked my task list I can see that I have 11 High’s for both external and internal development so I jump on one and start coding.

Since I work in MarComm and not IT I find that sometimes respect as a true developer is hard to come by and I am new to the group so I still have yet to earn some of the respect. However this affects how I have to approach certain tasks and can sometimes either help or hinder a situation. I have to be very careful to put on the bully face when needed but also have to be uber-friendly which I inherently am anyway.

So while coding I will normally have to attend around 2 meetings per day sometimes this is a waste and I continue to code on my Ipone but other times I find the meetings enlightening especially the ones that decide who owns what or who controls what process.

So enough of the ambiguitis stuff and onto the meat. When I say coding I normally am required to design, build, or correct errors in XSLT/XML, SQL/VB, SQL/C#, Flash, or Java. The changes can range from making a color change to full-blown design of new collections of data. I find myself working most in SQL/VB and XML/XSLT as that is what my predecessor chose to use. I am a C# guy myself as I started programming in C and then moved into Cocoa on the Mac before becoming a web-dev.

My current biggest project is the addition of video at work both internal and external. So my Flash skills have come into play there. I hope to write up so good material for deployment in an enterprise and even develop some best practices for video.

However what gets me the most praise at work is my ability to solve problems, not always solving coding problems but by taking a look at the whole picture and be able to develop a system that works for the environment it is in. I find it odd when I solve a problem and they say no one else has thought of that… it’s so simple. I love it.

I leave my work around 4 each day but most times I don’t actually get to leave until about 5 as I get caught up in a project and don’t know when to quite or something breaks last minute in the day. Either way I reverse my morning routing where I check my Iphone when I leave and when I get home. I then try and spend time with Daniel and wife until around 9 when it is time for me and Daniel to watch some youtube and go to sleep.

So that is what I do as a web-dev, I code, I listen, and I fix problems. What a better way to work than that. I really feal that I am doing what makes me happy as I can’t get enough of it. Right now I am at home on a friday night writing this post about work when I should be asleep… What can I say I am a true G33K and there is no place like 127.0.0.1

Goodnight
David Bates

Summing up the year 09

Hi,

I know it has been awhile since my last post and there has been a lot of time between my post. Truth is Since early this year I had lost interest in posting as what I had to post was not at all pleasant and was very hard for me just to talk about it to my own family much less blog about it. My wife wrote a beautiful post about what happened but to re-iterate we lost a baby that my wife had carried past the second trimester and worst of all she barely made it through the ordeal alive. She developed something called DIC which is very rare but basically caused her blood to not be able to clot. Luckily her doctor had seen one case of it before and immediately knew what to do. If it was not for his quick action I would have lost both of them. So you can see why I did not wish to write about this, heck I don’t even know why I am now other than to to let you know that I have not disappeared. In fact I am more into web developing, blogging, and social media more than ever. I accepted the role as the Web Developer for RFMD.com in June and have been overseeing the website since then. I am also trying to convince RFMD as a company to utilize social media.

When all of the trouble happened at the first of the year it was easier for me to use twitter than it was to blog. I added my twitter feed to this site so that you could look along. I know it is not the same as post but it helped me stay in touch and let people know how I was doing without actually blogging about it. I choose twitter as it was the best option for what I needed. You can locate my twitter feed and follow me from the list on the left.

We also found out at the first of October that we are pregnant AGAIN! we have both been scared to death given the outcome of the last one and happy all at the same time. But fortunately this time around has been completely different from the last but we are getting close to the same time in the pregnancy so we will be on edge for at least the next two weeks. We love the fact that we have another little one on the way. Daniel and our lives will be totally different. We will move from a family of three to four.

Earlier this year I bought a house for us. We have rented in the past so this is our first home. I say I bought it as it happened along the same time as the loss and Jess was very reluctant to commit to anything at the time. I had been looking for a new home as our family was about to grow and the place we was renting was way to small for another little one. The market in housing at the time was also a proponent as we found an awesome house and saved a ton of money on it. Jess loves the house and has told me many times since that I was right to go ahead and purchase it.

That being said the house was in need of repairs since we moved in we have completely redone the downstairs bathroom going all the way to the floor joist and jacking up the house. We have also replaced the water heater, every faucet in the house, and the downstairs heating system. All I can say is thank GOD that Obama saw fit to give us some tax money to help when we replaced the heating unit downstairs we made sure to get an energy efficient one so that we can qualify for the tax credit next year as well.

I love our house and how it is becoming our home. I always find it amazing how my wife can turn a boring room into something that looks like a piece of art. She is truly a master of design and of decorating. I cannot believe she allowed me to propose to her so long ago.

Current:
Daniel has a pretty bad cold and has been real clingy to his mommy recently I love the little guy. He has started to talk plainly and we can communicate very well together. This is a huge achievement. He also knows his shapes and colors and can even draw circles now. He makes me the happiest dad every time I come home. I can also see that he is going to be a good hearted boy as he is so sweet to everybody. He says please and thank you that which I must attribute to his mom’s teaching. She is doing a great job with him.

Well that is all my pregnant wife would like a bit of the cheeseball she has made and it is 10:00PM so after that I will probably go to bed exhausted from rough-housing my playtoy (Daniel)

Happy Holidays, let me know how your year has been below:
David Bates