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JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 22ND MARCH, 2019
______________________________________________________________________________
SUBJECT: Now the cat is out of the bag…
DATE: Fri 22 Mar 19:18:28 GMT 2019
I try very hard to keep this journal focused on WolfMUD and keep my personal
life out of it. Recently that bar has slipped, I’ve made a few comments over
the last few months about ‘life’ which has caused a few concerned readers to
email me to ask if everything was okay. Thank you!
Now the cat is out of the bag I can finally talk about what is going on. After
working for a web design agency for the last 16 years, outlasting all other
staff and directors, I’m being made redundant. Due to a number of unfortunate
events the business is deemed no longer financially viable and is closing it’s
doors. The whole situation has been very stressful, dragging on for at least
the last 6 months and I’ve not been able to say a word. That is why I have
been a little down lately. I’ve not been happy with the way things have been
handled and I’ve not been happy with the way in which ‘my’ clients have been
treated. It’s not my company and I have little say in the matter.
As a result I’m looking for a new job as a full-time, remote developer.
Preferably writing Go — which I have been writing for over 6 years, but I can
churn out PHP as well.
For the past 16 years I’ve been developing and maintaining websites using PHP,
MySQL/MariaDB, Apache, on Linux servers running Debian. If someone produces
the designs I’m happy to slice and dice them in Gimp. All of the 500+ sites
I’ve built have been custom written and range from simple brochure sites to
complex sites for running companies and used every day by tens of thousands of
employees and customers. Every project is versioned controlled using Git.
The PHP frameworks and content management systems the company used were custom
built by myself: V-Creator, Xoidal and Spindle+Bobbin. V-Creator was built
like a tank and certified for use on local government projects. It also won a
DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) award. V-Creator’s replacement was
supposed to be Xoidal. Xoidal was ahead of it’s time and only used for a few
projects. It used XML, XSLT, XPath and XQuery to generate web pages, was very
fast and worked well. However, the other developers in the company didn’t want
to get their heads around the technology. So I created Spindle and Bobbin as
Xoidal’s replacement. Spindle is a very fast, tiny, simple template engine and
Bobbin is a CMS framework built on Spindle. Typically response times are
sub-second for dynamic, content managed web pages — with no fancy networking
or content delivery system[1]. If it’s not less than a second I get unhappy :(
I own the IP on Spindle :)
When I originally joined the company the developers were using FTP to drop
random changes onto servers and overwriting each others work. I put all of the
projects into CVS and educated the developers. Later I switched the company to
Git, re-educating the developers, and migrating all of the projects from CVS.
Along with the Git to CVS I’ve also performed MySQL to MariaDB migrations as
well as PHP4 to PHP5 and PHP5 to PHP7 migrations.
The 6 dedicated, internet facing servers — all running Debian Linux — I have
been remotely managing and maintaining. For over 2 years I’ve been working
from home doing development, testing, documentation, deployments and managing
everything by myself. As we were a ‘one stop shop’ I provided support for
email for all of our clients as well as for their websites.
In addition to this I have over 30 years commercial development experience.
Sectors I have developed for include local government, travel, finance, asset
management, charities, construction and hospitality. I’ve programmed on
everything from mainframes to micro-controllers: 23 different languages[2] on
19 OSes[3] across 12 different architectures[4]. Admittedly some of these I
have not used for a long time. Missing from my résumé are the MIPs and RISC-V
architectures which I’d like to play with at some point. I also love the power
of regular expressions and live on the command line.
If anyone needs, or knows of someone who needs, such a person please drop me
an email: diddymus@wolfmud.org or point them at this web page.
All of this will impact WolfMUD. For a start my head is currently elsewhere.
As a ‘perk’ of my job, and an ‘incentive’ to keep everything running smoothly,
the WolfMUD site and git repository is hosted on one of the company servers.
Said servers are about to be powered down and plugs pulled. What then? I’m not
sure. If push came to shove I could host it on one of my machines using a
dynamic DNS provider. Not ideal, but an option.
--
Diddymus
[1] This site runs much faster. It uses my own static site generator, which
could easily be adapted for producing ‘pretty’ websites ;)
[2] Go, PHP, Perl, Bash, AWK, SQL, C, C++, Java, RPG/38, RPG/II, RPG/III,
RPG/ILE, CL (IBM), JavaScript, BASIC, 6502 Assembler, Z80 Assembler,
Rexx, XPath, XQuery, XSLT, Object Pascal (Delphi)
[3] Linux (Debian/Redhat/Yggdrasil), FreeBSD, Chrome OS, Android, macOS,
Windows (95/98/NT/7/8/10), OS/2, System/38, OS/400, OS/390, macOS,
Solaris, AIX, Coherent, MVS, RISC OS, CP/M, DOS, Palm OS
[4] i386, amd64, arm32, arm64, PowerPC, Alpha, Motorola 6800, Motorola 6502,
Z80, Atmel AVR, PDP-11 (?), ESA/390
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