The I.T. Life

Hey All,

Welcome to the future! The world of tomorrow! 2010! Seriously though, Happy (belated) New Year! I was sick with a stomach flu for New Years, so, I couldn’t do anything at all for a while there. Than I was back at work, busy as ever. I had a good Christmas, for gifts, I got me a Under Armour hoodie, some other new clothes, and lots of cool little stuff. On Boxing day I went to Futureshop and bought a PS3, some games, and some blu-rays.
As far as 2010 goes, goals, plans, whatever, I’m pushing myself even harder. I NEED to loose weight, not because most people say they do, but I have medical reasons that, I actually need to. I’m not going into that now. On the plus side, I’ve been working hard at getting more active, eating healthier, nothing extreme, but seeing what walking and less fast food does for me. I’ve gone down a pant size, I’m a 36 instead of a 38. Thats great, its been years.
I’m going to work on my leadership, and my ability to speak with confidence, so I’ve joined up with ToastMasters. I start on Tuesday. I’ve contact St. Johns Ambulance and am going to get involved as a VMFR (volunteer medical first responder) this month, and push myself to be more active in HRSAR (Halifax Regional, Search and Rescue). I’ve been very busy working on there E2C site, getting it ready for launch and online registration. Its up, and there very happy now. In the spring, I plan on re-completing my Map and Compass training, and passing my Woodslore. This will be a big thing for me, both physically, and mentally.
I booked a date in July to take my PHP5 certification by Zend. This will be big for me as well, Its a hard exam and I’ve been putting it off for a year now. When I get this done, I want to look into another Adobe certification, probably Flash CS3, or a Sun exam, one of the entry Java exams. To do all this, I need to get organized, so I plan on devoting a hour, every morning to studying. I will ignore emails, and anything else, I need to do this. As my manager explained it, if I want to lead people and projects, I have to be able to lead myself, I need to be organized, and get everything I want done. If I can’t meet my own goals, my team won’t meet theres.

Anyways, thats enough rambling for now. My Sunday is half over, and I should get back to playing the PS3. Studying, and work start back again early tomorrow.

Whos with me here? Ever since my time at NSCC, they have pushed the “portfilio” concept. I have seen its use, and lack there of. Yes, a portfolio is a great idea, espically in IT, and web, where we can put all our stuff in one location to show to a potential employer or a contract. Company portfolios are extreemly powerfull, to be able to give a presentation to a client and quickly show what you have down. On the other side, as a IT worker, to beable to show what you have in a very slick way can be just as powerfull. Now, I have never been asked for a portfolio in a interview, however I have been asked for work examples. My idea is for a very quick way to do this. I want basically a purpose driven CMS. I want to develop a product that has a uber slick install like wordpress, has a great backend, has a very customizable front end. I want it to be Ajax driven, PHP/MySQL, I want to use a solid open soruce framework, and I want it to be popular. But will it be? If you had this, would you care? Would the kicker for you be that you have a very powerfull back end, and a front that is so customizable you can create a flash template instantly? or a flex site for that matter? I’d like to hear from some guys in the community right now, users, and developers. What do you want, what do you need? What can make this something that you want to use? So, whos with me?

I think I’m going to take the bit jump and convert my portfolio over to the zend framework. Its a excellent framework that should simplify alot of the tasks that I am doing already, and give me the flexability to expand it. The idea behind a framework is that most of the work will be done for you, you have a massive library of code behind you that you can tap into. It cuts down your overhead by giving you pre-written code. Also, moving to zend will mean I can convert the site to full OOP and MVC. The problem of course is though this will have many long term advantages, this will mean taking a project that is about 50% done, and sending it back to square one. This won’t be a really quick transformation, but I think it will be at the very least, a good experiement.