I'm not sure why I opened up TypePad just now, I think I felt like writing but I wasn't sure what I wanted to write about. The project I've been working on for the past five months is nearly over, we're installing in the next few days. I still have a couple of little bugs to fix, but I feel pretty confident they will be simple. I worked 92 hours last week.
Someone told me I was mentioned in the Google reviews for gmail. The sentence they pulled out is attributed to Art Torrez. Which is my uncle's name. It's cool.
I think I'm going to leave this job in the near future. This might be burn-out talking, but I feel like a toll-booth clerk. I'm not making anything anymore. It's all re-hashing what I already know. If I could figure out a way to make tools like Dropload or Nutshell full-time I'd be a happy camper.
I did do a few cool things with this site we just built. I learned a little bit of Python and built some cool XML parsing and transformation functions, I think half of that was me trying to make my work more interesting. I think our team did a pretty good job and it was fun working with them, but at the end of the day the site is pretty much a big brochure to sell video games.
I'm probably going to take my comp days and head up to SF after E3. If it wasn't for my house I would have moved up there years ago.
Some Links
This looks like a good book to buy, with a forward by Joel Spolsky. I didn't go to college very long to get any sort of formal education, most of what I do is pretty standard web dev. I flirted with Windows applications for a while, but like learning a new language, you really need to be immersed in it to get it. I can write any sort of windows app possible, I think. I don't feel limited by what my applications can do, just how I go about doing them, and maintaining them. I don't know if that made sense.
I just realized we did our whole round of bug fixes using Joel's FogBugz. Funny how that works. That reminds me of something I was thinking about the other day. I'm 100 times more likely to buy something from someone who has a web prescence than someone who does not. I buy books by Paul, Matt, David, and even Cory quicker than I'd buy something from someone else. I can link them and read them, so I feel like I know them and I want to support them. Plus they write good books.
Mike
I've been reading this website ever since back in the day when it was green and you had all sorts of crazy anecdotes flying around. When you came out with nutshell, I immediately downloaded it, installed it, and told a boatload of friends who would love it as well. It was simple, small, out of the way, and free of advertising. Everything a side-app like that should be. It should enhance, not take over. But I was wondering, what ever happened to the second version of nutshell? When we could add our own search engines and the like?
Have you seen the mozilla firefox application that is similar to yours? It works pretty much the same, and they have a ton of different search bar plugins that you can download for different engines, and its all ad-free as well.
wednesday
may, 5 2004
Andre Torrez
A couple of things happened.
First of all I stopped using IE. Once I started using Mozilla and now Firefox and Safari, I saw the in-browser search tool and figured it was only a matter of time before they started allowing you to modify your search. I don't know if that exists or not, but I did find some dev happening with customizable toolbars for Mozilla.
The second thing that happened was I switched to the Mac and stopped developing on PCs. The code for Nutshell is on a drive somewhere, and I'd probably get it if there was some incentive, but i don't know where to start. I consolidated all my PC files across a couple of drives for safe keeping.
If someone steps up and wants to take over the development of it, I will hand over the code, but they'd probably find a cleaner version by searching MSDN for "KBBar" which is probably a lot more useful.
wednesday
may, 5 2004
Steve
Have you been dinking around with any development on the Mac, Andre? There's a lot of little one man shops out there making interesting little tools and toys; I'm not sure that I'd want to use Cocoa to develop a Photoshop-sized app, but Interface Builder really does seem to cut down the level of effort required to put together something small.
92 hours sound brutal. Enjoy your time off.
wednesday
may, 5 2004
tom
drop me a line when you get to SF.
wednesday
may, 5 2004
ChrisA
Wheaton, too.
Ya know, I think I've mentioned it before, but you need to write yourself a book. I know I'm not the only one who'd buy that in a heartbeat. Well, unless it was about server architecture or something. I mean a real book, with stories.
wednesday
may, 12 2004