tech ramblings

We have a litter of fox kits in the back field at our house.  Today we managed to catch them on film.  Please enjoy our very own foxkehs. 

Edited to add: Some people apparently don’t know Foxkeh…for comparison:

You can view the whole set here:
http://flickr.com/photos/lauraxthomson/sets/72157605003262452/

After a bunch of DNS and other broken-ness issues, I have given up on TypePad and moved my blog to self hosted WordPress.

Some links are still broken (notably About and Talks) but I’m working on that and hopefully they should be fixed soon.

Links to specific posts will also be broken, but they are all here somewhere.  (If I get time I might put in a bunch of rewrite rules but I’m not sure there are enough links into specific posts here for that to be worth it.  Tell me if you have specific requests.)

For those that haven’t heard it from me or the grapevine, I’m moving on from OmniTI.  I’ve had an exceptional amount of fun working with the good peeps over there for the last couple of years - it’s an excellent team and they do great work.  I’m still looking for my Next Big Thing.  Not sure yet what that will be but I am sure it will be fun.

I will be travelling a bit over the next week or so, will be in San Francisco next weekend and then on to Portland, Oregon on Sunday for OSCON.  I’ll be presenting the PHP and MySQL Best Practices tutorial with Luke, hope to catch up with all the usual suspects, meet some new people, learn some cool stuff, and have the general uber experience that is OSCON.  Hope to see some of you there.

Today I am at Kiwi Foo Camp, also known as Baa Camp.

It’s entertaining and educational.  I’ve met a bunch of people I have not met before - I’ve kind of gotten used to knowing lots of people at conferences that I go to.  This one has a large quotient of New Zealanders and hence I’m meeting tons of new people.

I gave a talk this afternoon called From Startup to Google:  How do I grow?  where I looked at a bunch of issues to do with growing companies: how to start, how to fund yourself, how to hire good people, and how to implement a basic software process.  One of the issues I talked about is something I feel really strongly about, and that is developing your company to have a good culture, making it a place where you and other people want to work, and where people can be passionate about what they want to do.  I have noticed that this often falls by the wayside as companies grow large, and a friend of mine commented that it seems to happen somewhere around the 100-200 employee mark.  I’m interested to know what other people think.

I’ve been to some great talks today: a free flowing discussion on user experience and another on email security, and a talk by Robert O’Brien on Atom, another on agile web dev tools, but the real humdinger of the day for me was Quinn Norton on body modification and enhancement.  The concept of a drug that allows you to control your sleep, implanted rare earth magnets that let you feel your hard drive spinning in your fingertips, or another drug that makes you tanned, thin, and increases your libido…well, who wouldn’t be interested? It’s like ShadowRun made real.

In the style of everybody else I know I thought I’d post my year in review.  2006 was a crazy, crazy year for me.

January:

• Rode my first decent EFA dressage test
• Said goodbye to family and friends
• Moved to Columbia MD for three months to work at OmniTI.

February:

• Began work in MD, working on Ecelerity webconsole
• Made new friends, found a place to ride, met lots of new horsy people
• Fell over on the ice a lot
• Fell in love with working at OmniTI

March:

• Finished work on Ecelerity 2.1
• Got disgustingly homesick
• Got promoted to Director of Web Development, and made tentative plans to stay in MD

April:

• Tore the cartilage in my knee and began eight miserable weeks on crutches and doped up on painkillers
• Thanked the powers that be for my friends who helped me in this crisis when I was on the opposite site of the planet from my husband and support system
• Was visited by Luke
• Spoke at MySQL UC, on crutches

May:

• Chris became a Principal
• Finally had knee surgery and could walk again
• Started riding again

June:

• Spoke at NYPHP
• Babysat the office while everybody else was out of town
• Spoke at ApacheCon in Dublin

July:

• Went home for the first time since January
• Went to OSCON and gave a tute and a talk

August:

• Returned to MD, further homesickness ensued.
• Went to Germany for long awaited vacation with Luke

September:

• Travelled to Microsoft for the Web Dev summit
• Moved to our new, bigger office in Columbia, started hiring a few more staff to fill it

October:

• Spoke at ApacheCon in Austin and DCPHP
• Rode in my first US horse trials (and was 5th)
• Had a hideous car accident

November:

• Appointed Principal and took a trip home to celebrate

December:

• Moved into my own house in MD at last
• Divisional Champion at a jumper show
• Trip home, Christmas, need I say more?

It’s been a year of amazing ups and downs.  Here’s hoping 2007 has just as many ups and less downs.

I took a photo as a marker of where I am right now:

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man. 
-Benjamin Franklin

Not only is another world possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
- Arundhati Roy

I have exciting news.

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to
the position of Principal. "  My role will include focusing on securing new
business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service
delivery. 

I’m really excited about this opportunity to help take OmniTI onwards and upwards, and I’m really looking forward to the next few years.  I’d like to thank Theo, George, Chris, and Sherry for giving me this opportunity.

And no, contrary to rumor, I will not be changing my name to Schlomson to fit in with the crew. 

I haven’t blogged in a while as I’ve been super busy with work.

I have two conference engagements coming up:  the PHP and MySQL Best Practices tutorial and the Maintainable Code talk at ApacheCon in Austin this week, and the Maintainable Code talk at my local conference - the DC PHP Conference - the week after.  I hope to see some of you there.

At OmniTI we’ve just (last weekend) moved into new offices.  They are really nice, much much larger, and with lots of bonus features like a training room.   I hope to use it to host local PHP and Perl usergroups, so stay posted for more on that shortly.  I have windows all around my desk, which is really nice, too.  We now have lots of empty desks, although some of them are starting to be filled, which is great news.  (There are still positions open, though - you knew I was going to mention that, right?  Zend tells me this is the best place in the US for a PHP developer to live.)

I still struggle with homesickness every day.  Riding here has helped a lot, and I have my first Horse Trials in the US at Iron Bridge Hounds on the 15th.  Wish me luck.

We are seeking junior - mid level web
developers to work on large scale, robust, web applications.

The ideal candidate will have:
- Good working knowledge of PHP, SQL (any of Oracle/MySQL/PostgreSQL), UNIX, and the usual HTML/CSS/JavaScript
-  Knowledge of database design, Ajax, web services, Perl and other programming languages will be highly regarded
- A bachelor’s degree in a relevant discipline
- Intelligence, intellectual curiosity, problem solving abilities, sense of responsibility, and drive to learn and self improve

We
offer an unparalleled work environment for smart people with a sense of
humor; challenging projects; and the opportunity to work with and be
mentored by some of the sharpest minds in the business.

Please include code samples with your application.  Applicants must be eligible to work in the United States.

Send applications to jobs@omniti.com.

My colleague Chris Shiflett has an interesting new blog post up about Cross Domain Ajax security problems.  I think  it’s a positive sign that people are thinking about security issues in web dev in advance these days, rather than the traditional model  where everybody adopts something, it is massively exploited, and then the fixes start to trickle in.

On Wednesday George and I are moderating the PHP Lightning talks at OSCON.  The Perl ones have been running for years and are a lot of fun.

If you have something PHP related to talk about, please come and talk to us about it.  The talks are really short (5 minutes) and minimal preparation is required.  If you have never given a conference talk before, this is a great way to start.  Or, if you’ve given lots of talks but really need to rant about something, this is your opportunity.

Email a really short description of what you’d like to talk about to  lightningtalks-oscon2006@omniti.com and we’ll put you on the list.

Hope to see you there!