Feverishly Working

I’ve been in a slight technical slump lately. There were many things
I hated about my investment bank job in New York: middle-management
was full of incompetent managers who found a way to make your life
miserable. There were many 120-hour weeks. I ate dinner at work at
least three out of five nights. Often more. The users weren’t all the
sweetest people you’ve ever met and technology is a male field and
combining that with the male-world of finance made the place a real
joy. (There’s a specific incident with one of my managers and a photo
of a woman and a horse that is somehow etched into my brain
permanently.)

Of course not everything was terrible. The pay was relatively good
but more importantly, the people I worked with were very competent.
Some of them were downright brilliant. I gained more practical
knowledge in one year of working with some of these people then I did
in my four years at Carnegie Mellon. Some of my coworkers inspired me
and made me a better coder. And I miss that. I miss it a lot.

In my current job I have more responsibility in some ways and I do a
wider variety of technology. I never had to administer servers on
Wall Street, they had other people to do that. And to boot machines,
and to configure files and compile unix programs (even though I did
download, compile, and install the latest version of emacs on every
machine I’ve ever used; this girl cannot live without emacs.) While I
enjoy learning about the intricacies of freeBSD and ini files as much
as the next gal, my main love is programming. And PHP just doesn’t
cut it for me. It was fun for the first few weeks while it was still
relatively novel. I liked the cleanness of Smarty and how it let me
separate stuff so I didn’t have to fill my PHP code with html crap
etc. However, two years into it, my fascination with PHP is long gone
and I need something else. I’ve coded a bunch of Python a while back
for fun and I am hoping to get back into it if only to preserve my
sanity.

Actually, my point was that I haven’t been feeling very technically
challenged lately so Jake’s been encouraging me to create a project
for myself that would be fun. After months of his badgering me, I
finally broke down and came up with an idea I liked. I’ve spent the
last week coding night and day and even though it didn’t make me a
fantastic coder, I’ve learned some new stuff I didn’t know and I have
a new website/domain now. I am hoping to roll it out for pre-alpha
testing in a week or so. If you’re interested in photography,
writing, knitting or scrapbooking (any of them) and would like to be
one of my guinea pigs, drop me a line: karen at karenika dot com.
Only if you’re going to play along tho and feel free to pass it on.

That’s why I haven’t been writing the past week. All my free time has
been 100% consumed by this. To be honest, it felt great to be
consumed by anything (other than David who’s my favorite thing to be
consumed by of course) and even if the site is a bust, I loved
working on it. College was probably the last time I felt like staying
up and working on one of my own projects as much as I did this past
week.

Jake was right after all. What a shocker.