Pete's Log: work and coding and stuff

Entry #1364, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)
(posted when I was 26 years old.)
First, to appease anybody who doesn't find the rest of this entry interesting, I offer this goodness: virtual bubblewrap.

I had my annual performance review at the beginning of December and received an excellent rating. As a result of this, I've been promoted to Senior Software Engineer. Which is pretty cool, but having the word "Senior" in my title makes me feel sorta old. But I don't really mind. Especially considering the new title came with a 15% raise.

Concord has hired a General Manager to manage netViz as a semi-independent P&L company. He starts Monday. I interviewed him and I've talked to him since he accepted the job. I think things are going to get more exciting and more challenging, but we'll see. I told him I want to have more interaction with customers, and so he's going to let me take on some sales engineer duties, which should prove interesting. But I also told him I want my primary role to remain development. And of course I want to continue to dominate the netViz foosball table.

I also took on a small consulting project on the side, porting a program from Mac OS to Windows. I feel sort of dirty, like I'm betraying the Mac faithful, but I'm also learning something and getting paid. The biggest lesson coming out of this is that even though I'm only spending 8-10 hours a week on this, I really like my free time, and will think twice before doing another job like this in the future.

Today I had one of those nice breakthroughs on that project, though. It's where you get to a point where you actually see a result on the screen. I still love the feeling of seeing something finally work after hours invested without visible results.

Vince (a.k.a. Dr. Freeh) once told me a story of writing some huge program for a research project. Said program printed out dots as a status indicator. So a screen full of

..............................................

was quite exciting, since it meant something was working. Well, somebody who was backing this project came in to see how it was going, and just couldn't understand why the developers were so excited by these dots. That's why I enjoy writing programs with graphical front ends. At least you've got something that's easy to show off in the end.