I’ve taken a big step in my career. I’ve become a software consultant.

The decision to leave my job of three and a half years wasn’t an easy one. I was working with some fantastic people, building the best software we could, but at the end of the day I wasn’t learning. The work was challenging, but the challenges were mostly non-technical. In this business, if you’re not moving forward you may as well lay down and die. I couldn’t change my situation, so I said my goodbyes and left.

I was conducting technical interviews recently for a senior developer position. I like to talk about a bunch of things, but there is one question I particularly enjoy asking each candidate. Write an implementation for this:

int Average(int a, int b)
{

}

It’s a great question because it’s a simple problem, and anyone that comes through the door should know the formula without having to ask. It’s interesting how people react to it sometimes, but I chalk it up to interview jitters. About half the people interviewed answer like this:

We did one of our monthly releases at work this week. Releases can be stressful and frustrating, and take a lot of methodical preparation to get right. It can be thankless work too; the only time a user notices a release is when it goes badly. We do our releases early on a week day to minimize impact, so if anything does go wrong, there’s not many bodies around to help out. It’s not much fun, but it’s important work that needs to be done.

I’m working on the code that parses VCalendar data so that it can be processed. I’m copying the data I care about into a simple data structure that can represent a calendar request in any format. Any logic that interacts with calendar requests would use this internal structure. I want it to be simple, only having the stuff that I need, but I don’t want to completely re-invent the wheel either, so I will use the VCalendar format as a guideline.

My company runs a 24/7 site with a substantial number of users and connections to partner systems all over the world. We do what we can to make the system fault tolerant, but problems can still appear at any time of day or night. Ideally we would have a technical support team that’s staffed around the clock, but that not in the cards for now.

We used to have a system where anyone that could fix a problem would get a text message, and whoever was closest to a computer would respond. It worked most of the time, but there were some issues. The team creating the tickets would often be unsure of which component was broken, so the issues would hit lots of people who would be unable to help, and it also exposes a quirk of human behaviour that makes us less likely to help when more people are available.

My next goal for the Themis project is to parse an invitation from an email. I am starting with invitations generated by MS Outlook because that’s my target audience, but a peak inside of a Google Calendar invitation gives me hope that I’ll be able to support multiple calendars without much trouble.

Outlook invitations are sent in the VCalendar format, content type “text/calendar”. The standard was published as RFC 2445 in 1998. It describes a standard layout for calendar data in the VCard format, which is described in RFC 2425.

I found my first 64-bit bug at work. I was moving a windows service built for the ‘Any CPU’ to a 64-bit server. It started fine on the new server, and gave no indication of poor health in the logs, but one key function was malfunctioning. I’m not exactly sure what the cause is, but I know that the hash of any binary file was resulting in the same value. The service does some direct memory manipulation which is a likely culprit.

My wife and I have been taking a Japanese class. I’m enjoying it quite a bit, even though learning languages has never been easy for me. I need to work hard to memorize all the new words, and that means lots and lots of practice.

My wife bought a pack of index cards. This is what a normal person would do. To me, it seems like defeat. Why use paper when there’s a computer in the room? While she’s at the store, I grab a white board and sketch out a data model.

I decided to give IE9 a try. What’s not to like about a browser that’s supposed to be faster, cleaner, and support new HTML features?

They really nailed the faster and cleaner parts. I didn’t find the user interface in IE8 too busy, but seeing the improvement I’m happy for the extra space.

Plunking a site onto my task bar like it were an application is pretty awesome. There are a couple of websites that I’ll do this for without hesitation.I wonder how long it’ll take to see adoption of the magic html jump list task extensions. I’m not terribly optimistic myself; I’m hoping someone will find a way to add tasks and maybe an overlay to sites that don’t have them built in.

I’m charging forward on the Shared Resource Schedule Service. There are a lot of things I’m getting into place before I start writing code. Don’t try to tell me that I’m not being agile either, you always need to design a little to write good code. The key to being agile is designing only as much as you need, and being prepared to change your mind later.

The Name

The first order of business was to choose a name. It helps to know the name before you create a project. I’m also hoping to put the source in a public repository right away so that I can talk about the coding process while I build it.