The time has went in quickly, with a fast-pace and quick turnaround times being the norm. The vibe in the office has been great, with a decent soundsystem pumping out dance music all day and my producer Gary, aka DJ Gary Quinn, dropping in a few choice chunes.

The guys here have a real passion for the web and enjoy a good laugh, for instance, this week we had a challenge to wear a different hat each day. Here’s Iain and Jurgen in their full cowboy glory:

I spend most of my days wrangling CakePHP, the PHP framework I started developing with nearly 3 years ago now. I also do most of the administration of the Linux boxes used to host the client sites and automate as much as I can with handy bash scripts, all from the comfort of this shiny iMac:

On the downside the standard working hours are 9 to 6, which is longer than I’m accustomed to. You can’t have it all

The culture-shock has been enormous: I’m not flooded with emails and phone calls all day, nor battling with bureaucracy and the people are really chilled-out. I don’t know myself!

The adjustment period will end and no doubt I’ll be required to produce product but I think this gig has potential

I’m spending a few days down the country before I start my new my job catching up with my family, tinkering on some personal projects and just generally “getting my head showered.”

I’m enjoying the break from the daily grind with my only real task being to steel myself for the upcoming change to my 9-5 existence. I find myself so resistant to change: my levels of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt seem to automatically soar at the prospect of anything out of the ordinary, but I’m presented with a great opportunity to sharpen my development skills within a lower-pressure environment. Score!

Expect details of my new gig soon.

On the whole the experience has been, well, experience: neither good nor bad but worthwhile all the same. I do have gray hairs now though.

Soon, process monitoring, environment management, receiving 700 emails a day and being on-call will be a distant memory. Along with my nemesis of the past 9.5 months, the Tibco TIC.

And yes, before you ask, I have my name barrel in my pannier bag

The first script I’ve written that actually does something useful is countdown.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# countdown to 5pm
# 2008 SJW
import datetime
now = datetime.datetime.now()
home = datetime.datetime(now.year, now.month, now.day, 17, 0, 0, 0)
total_secs = (home - now).seconds
hours = total_secs / (60 * 60)
minutes = (total_secs - (hours * 60 * 60)) / 60
print hours, " hours and ", minutes, " minutes until 5pm"

Very simple I know but I just had to share it

Thanks to Clinton for the GeSHi WordPress plugin.

How time has flown. More surprisingly, I almost seem to have grown accustomed to the stress of working with mission-critical systems and getting called-out in the wee hours of the night.

I couldn’t resist…

What you are seeing is a screenshot of my screen session for a project I’m working on.

Editing a Perl script with vi in my web browser, I love it!