LinLog

Note: This is a short entry that's been sitting in my drafts folder since March 2010, i.e. from half a career ago. My "new" job at the time was with an online advertising startup. It was my first and only early-stage startup experience. In retrospect, it was useful because it exposed me to a lot of new thing, in terms of not only technology, but people, processes, and ways of approaching software development (looking at things from the QA perspective was particularly eye-opening). It was not, however, enjoyable. I've also worked for later-stage startups and found that much more enjoyable. Sure, you don't get nearly as much equity when you come in later, but there's also less craziness. (And let's face it, most of the time the stock options never end up being worth anything anyway.)

Wow. I haven't posted anything in almost six months. I'm slacking. (Note: If only I'd known then that I wouldn't publish this for nine years...)

Actually, I've been kind of busy with work. I will have been at the "new" job for a year next month. The first six months I was doing the QA work, which was actually kind of interesting, as I'd never done that before. I did some functional test automation, got pretty familiar with Selenium and PHPUnit, got some exposure to an actual organized development process. Not bad, overall.

On the down side, the last six months have been a bit more of a cluster file system check, if you get my meaning. Lots of overtime, throwing out half our existing code-base, etc. On the up side, I've officially moved over to development and we're using Flash and FLEX for our new product, which are new to me.

The good part: FLEX is actually not a bad framework. It's got its quirks, but it's pretty powerful and, if nothing else, it beats the pants off of developing UIs in HTML and JavaScript. And while it's not my favorite language in the world, ActionScript 3 isn't bad either. It's strongly typed, object oriented, and generally fairly clean.

The bad part: Flash is not so nice. It wasn't quite what I was expecting. I guess I assumed that "Flash" was just design environment for ActionScript programming. Actually, it's more of an animation package that happens to have a programming language bolted onto it. The worst part is that our product requires that we do the Flash portion in ActionScript 2, which seriously sucks. I mean, I feel like I'm back in 1989. And the code editor in Flash CS4 is...extremely minimal. As in slightly less crappy than Windows Notepad. I am sersiously not enjoying the Flash part.

(Note: On the up side, none of this matters anymore because Flash is now officially dead.)