ace's blog » Lansa

Interview on Wednesday: should I stay or should I go?

petewood — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:33:19 +0000

I had an interview yesterday for a 6 month contract. I really liked the facility and the work environment seemed very clean and nice. The people I interviewed with were very nice. The only problem I have with it, is the length of the contract. My biggest worry is about not being extended. Both of the people I spoke with spoke long-term so that made me feel a bit better, I just can’t shake the worry though. I thought I’d make a list of pro’s and con’s of my current and prospective contracts.

Current company pros

Relatively stable – current contract expires in Sept 2008 but there is an extension in the hands of the client’s legal department awaiting approval that would expire in Sept 2010.
I am allowed to work from home one day a week.
Pay is good, benefits are decent and fairly inexpensive

Current company cons

I’m fucking miserable here!
I’m writing code about 10% of the time, the other 90% is spent analyzing production data and modifying it since it’s been screwed up by the system – basically, I feel like I work on a help desk.
Being on-call. I have a pager that I have to “man” once every 10 days (approximately speaking); every 5th weekend, I’m on-call and basically can’t leave my house.
I now how 3 time sheets to fill out! One of them, the newest, easily takes about 30mins/day to fill out.
I’m not learning anything new here since I’m barely writing any code.
I have to commute 62 miles (round trip) and spend about 45 minutes on I4 (with smooth traffic, no accidents).

Contract position pros

Major pay increase, 66% from my current hourly rate – dollar for dollar, not including how much my benefits cost. Meri would pick up the benefits from working part-time at her job.
20 mile round trip from my house to client site.
I would be writing code again!
No more on-call support (and therefore no more feeling like I work on a help desk).

Contract position cons

Only a guaranteed 6 month contract. The company has a very strong history of extending their contractors and eventually offering them full-time positions, but that is not guaranteed. The only guarantee is that I’ll have a paycheck for 6 months.

If the client decided not to renew the contract at the end of the 6 month period, they would have to let me know 45 days prior to the end of contract and vice versa if I decided not to stay with them either. If the contract expired in 6 months and was not renewed, we would be able to live on the “extra” money that I made from the hourly increase for about 4 months after the contract was over. That would give me 4 months to either look for another job or find another contract. If I was unable to find another full-time position somewhere else in Orlando. Moving out of Orlando is not an option. If I did have to start working other contracts, then I would potentially have to travel a lot.

So basically, I’m not sure what to do. Any ideas?

Week in review

petewood — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:10:13 +0000

We got back from our trip to mass. on Tuesday. The trip was like our
normal trips, some fighting, some fun, more uncomfortable than anything
really. We had Aaron’s birthday party on sunday, in mass. He had a lot
of fun and got quite a few gifts. We had to mail ourselves a box full of presents even after we filled up the extra bag that we brought to fly some presents back with us! When we got home, we gave Aaron the presents that we got for him: a slushy maker and a fish tank! Meri took him to the pet store and got him a couple of small fish. He named them “grapey” and “orange”. He gets really excited when it’s time to feed them.

We got back Tuesday and I went to the 2008 LANSA User Conference here in Orlando. I got to talk to a few people I worked with at Terminix and attended some of the WAM sessions. Those were great! I found the AJAX lab to be a bit lacking and the speaker wasn’t that good in my opinion.

I worked from home yesterday and now it is Friday and I am back at the office. I haven’t been here for a week! I must’ve saved a ton of money on gas (well, like $60). Now I’m on-call for the weekend.

Yesterday, when I was working from home, I took a break for lunch (which is unusual for me), I sat with Eli for a bit and I was playing with him on the couch. I started making some weird noises and poking around his mouth to try and get him to smile at me. Normally, it’s difficult for me to get him to smile but he smiled at me for about 20 minutes! It was awesome! I loved it when Aaron first started smiling at me and I love it now that Eli is doing the same. I can’t wait until Eli is walking and talking as well.

Resignation

petewood — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:24:25 +0000

Today, I resigned from my current company. I’ve known this day was coming for about 26 days now. The decision to leave my current position was one of the easiest I’ve had to make in my young career.

I did learn a lot from my time here and have worked with two of the finest consultants from LANSA.

I am looking forward to my wife being able to work or not work, based solely on what she wants to do, not because we need affordable benefits for the family. Meri will now be able to stay home with our new baby for as long as she wants, which is the ultimate benefit. I would like for this baby to have the same advantages Aaron had when Meri was able to stay home with him.

My son, the baker

petewood — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:21:38 +0000

If that isn’t the cutest picture of a kid in a green baker’s suit, then you know some really cute kids!

I’m also considering a new position! This means major changes for the family I think. After speaking with the recruiter, this sounds like a great opportunity. Meri and I will have to talk about it.

Insomnia

petewood — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:18:19 +0000

Meri and I were in bed, getting ready to fall asleep and then she started talking about work and how she didn’t want to go back tomorrow. That got me talking (and thinking) about my job. Then I started bitching…and bitching and bitching and bitching. So now, about 2 hours later (yeah, we go to bed early here), I’m online. I feel like I should redo my once-proud website.

Revisiting development on that site got me thinking about Barry‘s site: FeedBang.com. Dammit man! I was once at peace with not continuing development on PeopleArray.com and someone alright with letting my PHP skills get rusty. Now that I saw that you’ve done work to FeedBang.com, I feel like I need to get off my ass and update that site! Good work on FeedBang.com Barry; it looks pretty cool and I really like that you’ve added the ability to login with openid.

I remember my days at Terminix when I had all kinds of time to develop a site like PeopleArray.com. I once went three weeks doing absolutely nothing, besides asking my manager for something to do. Yeah, that’s right, 3 weeks…in a row!

I loved working for Terminix (both because of the people and the company) but I hated Memphis. I’m glad to be gone but I’m not happy where I ended up. I love being back in Florida but dislike my job. I have learned a lot. I’m proud to say that I know a LOT about LANSA Web! I’m just hoping that I can find a job where I can continue doing either LANSA Web or get back to some Visual LANSA.

….

Ok, so insomnia is not letting go of it’s grip and I just visited Digg.com and Reddit.com. I haven’t been to those sites in a really long time. Normally I just read them through Google Reader.

….

Is it weird to laugh at something I blogged about a long time ago? I remember writing this and even the details of the circumstances surrounding the issue. Stupid financial month reports. Anyway, I laughed about this blog entry: http://www.acedanger.com/2006/06/08/808008704-megabytes/.

….

Good night (I hope).

New projects

petewood — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:34:55 +0000

Long time no post!

Well things have been busy here at work! The LANSA projects are wrapping up for me: the version 2 of the Gradebook, written in LANSA with heavy use of AJAX (and JavaScript) and CSS, has been handed off to the consultants we have been using since the project began; I re-wrote the Employee portal and just finished that up this morning. Next on my plate here is Gradebook version 3!

The newest version of the Gradebook will be written in/with WPF. There aren’t many people writing WPF code right now so for me, this is another ground-breaking moment (coupling LANSA with AJAX was the first). Learning WPF will be great for me and my career and ultimately for my family. I’m excited about learning another language and being productive with it.

Other than all that work stuff, there isn’t much to write about. We have been busy painting and turning our house into a home. We’ve put in new laminate bamboo floors in the downstairs portion of the house and also put up about half of the lights that we bought a few weeks ago (5 down, 5 to go!).

Here’s hoping I don’t neglect my blog anymore!

LansaDocs.com – Lansa Documentation Wiki

petewood — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:21:48 +0000

I just registered a new domain, LansaDocs.com. I registered it because the current Lansa documentation is somewhat lacking and needs some tender loving care that only the users (developers) of Lansa can provide. I have installed a Wiki (MediaWiki to be exact) so that the users can modify or add notes as they see fit.

It is my hope that the Lansa developers will begin to use and help maintain the site so that the Lansa documentation can be a bit more user-friendly and contain some very useful information. My target audience can currently be found at the Lansa Yahoo Group, which is currently the most useful Lansa help facility available.

Orlando news for me!

petewood — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:29:44 +0000

Let me just say start out and say that I have not abandoned the blogging that I grew to like a lot during my significant downtime while I worked at Terminix. I have just been really busy; between work and WoW and house searching and then more work…plus I had a lot of work to do…at work. Lots of work…at work.

After a long search, I have found a place to rent in Winter Park! It’s about 7 miles from work so my commute time should only be about 20 minutes either way. The house we are renting is decent. It is 100% tile…no carpet. That was our largest limiting factor in looking for a place to rent. We were told that Aaron would *probably* be developing asthma in the next year due to his current allergies. It was recommended that we avoid carpet if possible so we did. I signed the lease today. We move in on December 20th. I will be flying to Memphis, for the last time, on December 16th, flying back with Aaron on the 18th and Meri is going to drive down on the 18th and 19th.

In “I STILL have a house to sell” news, couple number 27 came by to look at our lovely home since we put it on the market many moons ago. They are very interested and decided that it was the house for them. They have a house to sell and it is currently on the market but is not showing well because “they have too much stuff and it makes the house look small”. They are currently in the process of trying to get approved for financing for both their mortgage and for the mortgage for our house! That sounds like a lot of work to me. We were told that they stopped looking at houses after they saw ours. If they do not get approved and still want our house, we are going to offer them a lease with an option to buy. That would be awesome to not have to pay a mortgage AND rent!

So anyway, I should probably get back to work. Work is fun, minus being insanely busy all the damn time. I’m doing a lot of AJAX integration (but not with XML, we use JSON because it’s faster) with LANSA. If you have no clue what that all meant, here’s a simpler way of saying it: I’m doing wicked cool stuff on the web! My JavaScript skills have increase dramatically in the past 3 months! I am having a lot of fun doing the actual coding part of my job. Now the operations side I could do without but you have to take the good with the bad.

Lansa and JSON and the Yahoo UI

petewood — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:22:06 +0000

I just wrote an “auto complete” script in Lansa utilizing the Yahoo UI which passes back data from the DB2 database as a JSON string!

I told you I would go on to be the Lansa programming ninja I’ve always aspired to be!

First weekend in Orlando

petewood — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 01:43:50 +0000

So this is my first weekend in Orlando and what am I doing? Am I out drinking and partying and acting like a bachelor? Nope! I’m here at 9:30 pm on a Friday night writing a blog post on my new work laptop while I take a breather setting it all up and installing my much used software. Whew, long sentence…

I had intentions of coming home and seeing if Tania and her boyfriend wanted to go get wings at Ker’s Wing House, my treat but Tania went out and I sat around. I ate some chips because I was insanely hungry and was going to talk to Meri and Aaron and then head out for a few beers and some wings. Well the chips did a number on my stomach and now I feel like shit. You know that warm, clammy feeling you get in your stomach when somethings just not right? Well that’s me right now, feeling shitty.

I did mention that I got my new laptop from work. It’s bad ass. It is a Dell Inspiron with dual Centrino 2 GHz processors, 2 GB of RAM and it has a widescreen screen to boot. My current resolution on this laptop is 1680 x 1050. Well I think that’s cool…

Anyway, work is going alright. I’m not sure if I made a mistake or not taking this job but I just have to keep telling myself that the move is better for the family and I will be learning a ton of new stuff here and things in the future will be better. Once I can get the database figured out, things will be much better.

Meri just called me for the third time telling me that Aaron isn’t going to bed for her tonight. She has done amazingly well getting him to bed since they’ve been up in MA. Normally, I put Aaron to bed and it has basically been the norm since Aaron decided he didn’t need boobs to go to sleep.

I’m going down to Tampa tomorrow to hang out with my friend Bernard and a bunch of his other friends. I have a sneaky suspicion that I will be the only white person there. This will be the first time I’ve seen Bernard’s condo since he bought it. It will be great to see him again, it’s been well over a year since we’ve hung out.

My first weeked at this job and I have to work over it! As if the 12 hour days weren’t enough, I have to do this too? I asked how much I would be asked to work on a weekend and they told me that it was a rare occassion. I suppose they will tell me that when I have to do it again!

Wow, reading over this post and it appears that I have had a lot to blog about since I’ve only put up one very small blurb since I moved down here a week ago! I guess I should keep doing the blogging thing…if I have time that is.

I’ve been so busy at work that I haven’t had a chance to even look at any PHP or AJAX code. Before this week, I hadn’t written a line of PHP or AJAX code in two weeks prior to me moving down here! I may lose my touch. Too bad huh? I’ll just have to fall back on my Lansa Web development skills. That’s ok, they pay better than PHP/AJAX coding.

Alright, CSI Miami is going to start in about 15 minutes and I have to watch it since I can’t record it since the house I’m staying at doesn’t have a DVR! This woman is living in the stone ages!