zk/diary/2011-09-09-15:37:42.md

%title 2011-09-09 15:37:42
%date New Job, New Site
:blog:fossil:diary:

I feel like I've been neglecting this blog and my site as a whole, but it's been for legitimate reasons.

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After running through a few rather interesting interviews (one of which involved rewriting the Java collections API from scratch, one involved a shortest path graph traversal with some added edge-weights), I wound up with a new job the Monday after finals week at bConnected Software in Louisville, CO, where I've been working for the past four months or so.  I've had an absolute blast so far, doing a ton of Grails UI development, and I've learned a lot about user interface and experience design.  The company deals mostly with health insurance, which is proving to be a nicely complicated problem to solve, and I've gotten in at the right time, what with all the legislation surrounding the topic.  There has been quite the focus on Health Care Exchanges here, and we've been really working on defining the process of those in terms of both backend and UI/UX.

There have been a few little problems with the job so far.  The biggest by far is the commute - the drive averages about fifty minutes each way and is costing quite a bit, what with gas and tolls.  Since I was not a very smart kid over the last six or seven years, I've got quite a bit of credit card debt to pay down, so I wind up with relatively little money left after paying for the commute and paying down the card's balance.  Other than that, corporate life is taking some getting used to: seventy hour weeks and business rules especially.

In other news, I did another experiment with rapid prototyping in Django and came up with <a href="http://characters.openfurry.org/">http://characters.openfurry.org/</a> which is a good deal more complicated than my <a title="Badger!" href="http://badgerific.com" target="_blank">last experiment</a> which proved to be pretty fun.  I wrote it after watching several furry artists deal with different ways of accepting information from commissioners regarding what they want drawn.  The result is a site which lets you manage a hierarchy of information about characters, from the characters themselves, to different morphs (basically a combination of species and gender), to potentially several descriptions of those morphs.  The site will also let you attach characters to different locations - places on the 'net such as MUCKs and chat clients - and attach images to just about anything.  As an afterthought, I added a means for activity to be logged so that you could see what the owner has done recently with their characters/morphs/descriptions.

I had originally intended to use this site as a playground for <a href="http://angularjs.org" target="_blank">Angular</a>, a nifty new Javascript library that I'm quite taken with.  I ran into some snags, however, and did not get that implemented in my allotted time span, so it will have to wait, perhaps until this weekend.  In the mean time, I've been slowly poking through <a href="http://mbostock.github.com/d3/" target="_blank">d3</a>, the successor to Protovis, in order to provide some visualizations for the site, using this as a learning experience.  It's proven tougher than I had thought, but definitely a lot more flexible because of it.  Another new thing I've been playing with is the <a href="http://goldengridsystem.com/" target="_blank">Golden Grid System</a> in order to lay the page out in a flexible manner without having to think about it too much.  Once I get some time, I'd like to get the Angular interface running, and maybe also play around with <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/" target="_blank">Twitter's Bootstrap</a> to make this a much prettier site than it is currently; though I'm partial to minimalist designs, as it stands now, I know a lot of people like flashier sites.

Finally, here are some thoughts from a commuter's perspective:
<ul>
	<li>No one who drives a Saturn is happy to be on the road.</li>
	<li>Most people who drive Priuses and work trucks are pretty predictable drivers - I like that.</li>
	<li>Most people who drive Mazda 3s and 6s, Infinities, and Audis are pretty unpredictable - I don't like that.</li>
	<li>"Arrest-me red" is a real color.</li>
	<li>Pickup drivers are usually somewhere on a scale from angry to smug SOBs; usually, the older, beat up pickups are smug SOBs and the brand new, super clean, very large pickups are angry SOBs.  This is not necessarily the rule, though.</li>
	<li>Audiobooks are awesome.  News radio is depressing.</li>
</ul>