LinLog

I started my new job yesterday. After a whopping 4 days of work, I'm actually feeling pretty good about it. I've been leaving the office feeling energized and enthused about my work - or at least not run-down (though the 1.5 hour commute fixes that). This is quite a change from my last job.

On Tuesday I started work on my first project. Of course, I really only got in a couple of hours of real work. Most of the day I spent with another programmer going over the database schema, application architecture, and all that good stuff. You know, the things you need to know to be able to sensibly make an addition to a substantial piece of software. I managed to get a bunch of work done Wednesday and today, though. It's really not that big of a project, it's just that I'm not used to the codebase and it's a somewhat large and complicated.

So far, this job is a lot more fast-paced than my last one. In fact, I've already learned a few things.

1. In PHP library files, you don't need to close the <?php ?> tag. You can just have the opening <?php and not have to worry about stray space at the end of the file. For some reason, I just never knew that.
2. Writing PHP will error reporting turned off really sucks. Well, technically it's not completely off. The errors are logged - to a 200MB file on another server. Which still sucks.
3. MySQL throws really weird errors when you try to declare a foreign key and give it the wrong size integer for the key column.
4. I had never used ti before, but the jQuery JavaScript library is very cool. For example, it allows you to select DOM nodes with XPath expressions. How cool is that? Though on the down side, the syntax is a little...weird.

I'm sure the learning is just beginning. Methinks this job will make for much better technical blog-fodder than the last one.