The Mind of David Krider

<h3>Introduction (or, Corpus Collosum)</h3> Some time around 2006, I was completely fed up with my job, and started looking around for something else. I got a hot lead on what seemed to be a good match. I talked to their HR rep on the phone. She seemed very interested. And then, all of the sudden, the lead got cold. She wouldn't return calls or emails for several days. I finally got a terse email stating something to the effect of "we're just not interested." Given how well it had been going, I was left to wonder what it might have meant. I realized that I had written some things here that I was pretty sure would have offended the HR rep personally, and I'm about the easiest guy in the world to Google, so I settled on the conclusion that they had searched for me online and hadn't liked what they had seen. Since I was still looking around, I didn't want this to happen again, so I immediately deleted all my content except the front page, and edited this space to say something really generic about what happened. I'm still not being completely transparent about the incident, but that's the way it's going to be on this site now. After a year or so, I started to get frustrated with not having my web site up and running. Along with needing to go back and filter all the content, I decided to rewrite the programming. At the time, it was a "half-blown" PHP application. Though it was all served out of a database, I still had to edit the content manually, and then upload it. During the rewrite, I moved to using the Smarty template system over top of my application, and had made it possible to edit pages in place on the server. While there were some advantages, I hit a brick wall with the security model. Since there's just one user to authenticate, I didn't want to write a real authentication system. I just wanted to continue using HTTP auth methods. However, I just couldn't make protecting my admin pages in a subdirectory (with a custom .htaccess file) work with Smarty (and my way of including common headers and footers), so I gave up, and the site sat untouched for another two years. Now I have had a new job for about a year, at the time of this writing, and two things have happened during this time. The first is that the new people in my life have gotten to know me, and therefore have at least some context about what I may say here. While I have taken down the material I suspect got me in trouble before, I still have potentially controversial things posted up here. It is my hope that those around me will understand that I'm not as harsh as I can sometimes come acress in this format. (Even when I go back and read what I've written here, I sometimes cringe and think, wow, that's harsh.) But I'm not the same person I was back when I wrote a lot of these things. Some of this content is 10 or 12 years old! I'm going through and rewriting what's here, but this will take time. The other thing that happened is that I learned Ruby on Rails. As was suggested to me, this has indeed increased my productivity with writing web applications. In fact, adapting all the data in the database to be Rails "friendly," rewriting all of the programming, and getting a new hosting provider and setting everything up, probably only took about 22 hours. That may or may not seem like a small amount of time to some people, but I contrast that to the fact that I had taken weeks to rewrite this thing in Smarty before I got stuck. I just got a wild hair, based on some success I had had on a project at work, and cranked this out over a busy weekend. As I've continued to pick away at the details of the formatting and presentation, I'm more and more impressed with the framework. So, as before, this is where I get to talk about the things I want to talk about, but now I'll be "speaking" in more measured tones. While it's certainly true that I'm not as critical as I was before, I guess I've also learned how to use some tiny measure of tact along the way. I thought about limiting myself to only what I would say to a total stranger, but that may be too restrictive to be interesting. I'll be targeting my comments here for the imaginary person who might only have known me for a week or two. I guess I'll see how this works out for me...

2008-01-05T18:30:08-08:00

Stuff to think about home.html false 1

2009-05-25T20:21:05-07:00