Interviewing
Interviewing can be a pain and it can be a lot of fun. When you're out of a job and you really need one, then interviewing can be a lot of grief trying to make yourself fit into each and every interview simply because you need the job. When you have a job, and are looking for something better - more interesting work, more free time, more pay... then interviewing is a lot more enjoyable. At least it is to me.
This morning I had a lovely talk with a company, and while nothing's perfect, this place sounded as close to it as I've ever heard. They're looking for someone to do just the kind of work I like doing, in a small team, with the right tools for the job - and get this, they are even looking to use Mac OS X on the developer's workstations. This is almost like a dream. I can hardly believe it.
Of course, this might be a little bit of a sales pitch as many interviews are - "please like us so you'll come work here". It works both ways. So I'm not expecting all that I heard to really materialize when (and if) I go and talk to them in person, but it's a lot in the right direction and that's a really big step forward for me. I'm looking forward to see what the reality of the place is. It promises to be a very interesting time.
Things are very predictable these days at work. More data, more views, it's like I'm a super-DBA where the "Database" I manage is all the data they are interested in seeing. It's not particularly exciting work, but it's OK.
A few days ago I did a minor overhaul on one of the input parsers I had in InfoShop. The flat file parser was really pretty limited and I wanted to make it more general in it's parsing as well as in it's inputs. So I added the same style of code as the database parser to allow the creation of nested data structures, and allowed for a command to be executed and the output of that command be the input to the parser. This will give me a much greater capability as I can put scripts there as well as programs and such. It'll make for a much larger universe for the parser and it's needed that for over a year.
Other than that, things are moving along at their own pace. Not too bad given it's July.