Recently in Work Category

Day Five was a short day because I had to leave to catch my flight back home around 3 in the afternoon.

Last night, I watched a couple more training videos in my hotel room. This morning, I watched one more and was all caught up on what I was supposed to watch this week. I talked to one of the business ananlysts with some questions I had come up with from watching the videos. I got all my questions answered.

I spent some time with my team leader going over some more development practices. I’m glad he’s patient with me. :)

Last night, I looked up a few coworkers on Facebook and added them as friends. One of them, a functional architect, accepted my friend invite almost immediately. She admitted to me today that she looks up every new hire on Facebook. It was a little shocking to discover I had been “stalked” before I had “stalked.”

Today, I went to lunch with two of the functional architects, one being my new Facebook friend, to a little “hole in the wall Indian place.” The food was super-tasty.

Now I’m on my way home. It’s been a great week.

Now, our development manager talked to me about my blog posts. He’d heard from the functional architect I went to lunch today that I had written about my previous lunches on my blog and that gave her a good idea of where we were going to go to lunch today.

He expressed concern that I had information about the company in my posts. He acknowledged that I hadn’t published any secrets but that I had discussed names and what could be construed as business practices.

I was devastated. For all my efforts to be a good new employee, I had “caused concern” with what I was doing outside of business hours. My lack, perhaps, of tact, respect for the company, consideration of possible consequences of revealing what I did reveal, was causing friction with at least one person of decision-making capital at the company.

Crap!

I went back and edited each of my blog posts for the week, removing any names, any names of any software, hardware, or services that I may have mentioned by name. The only thing I thing I left was my Apple MacBook Pro. I hope that’s not a problem.

In retrospect, I made a serious miscalculation, which isn’t surprising considering I seem to have a history of miscalculating things of a social nature. Chalk it up, maybe, to my maybe being afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I can see that if I had been an employee with the company for some time, to the point everyone, especially those in decision-making positions, knew who I was, what kind of person I was… Basically, if they knew me well enough to trust me, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem, or as much of a problem. But with me being the new kid on the block, coming in and blogging names and crap, even if I was being careful not to divulge anything that might be a company secret, I understand now why they’d be nervous.

These corporate social dynamics are a real challenge for me. It’s almost like I never know when I’m being appropriate and when I’m not. I guess I should be more careful and just ask more questions about everything.

Day Four. I will be going home tomorrow and will be home for approximately 28-30 hours before hopping on a plane again and heading back to Pittsburgh for the second week of training.

Today was my first development team meeting. As many of our developers work remotely, the meeting was held via a conference call and an online screen-sharing solution . I liked that it was short (about an hour) and to the point.

I closed three issues today. Now, I wouldn’t be so proud of that except that these were all supposed to be very simple issues, like “change the spelling” types of issues. One of them, however, ended up being more complex than anyone thought. I found the problem extended into the database schema data. As a result, what my team leader thought was going to involve minor editing of one, two, maybe a handful of files, ended up being something like 14 files and a new schema change. To fix this issue, I had to go through the process of testing schema changes and writing detailed instructions for testing.

It felt good to get that one done.

The other two were pretty simple. One was just changing the text of a link inside the application. The other was formatting a date from a string that looked like this “YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS” into this “MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS”. Pretty simple stuff, but it still gives me good experience working with the source code management tools, issue management system, and the applications themselves.

Because of all the actual work I’ve been doing, I’m behind a day or so on watching training videos. I’m going to try to catch up on those tonight.

I went out looking for a bookstore last night. Google Maps erroneously told me there was a Barnes and Noble near 6th Street and Wood Avenue. Of course, I didn’t figure that out until I walked over there. A security guard in the building at the address just laughed at me and told me the nearest one was clear out of town.

Bummer.

I went to lunch with two of the system administrators for the company. We had a lot to talk about because of my background doing systems administration.

Day Three was more of the same. More hacking on fairly simple and straightforward problems. More watching training videos. More training on coding practices and standards. More training on time tracking. Another lunch with a couple other people — a business analyst and one of the developers who I interviewed with a couple weeks ago. They took me to Euro Cafe which was decent food and the dining room was refreshingly quiet compared to most places during the lunch hour.

Tomorrow morning, I’m providing a urine specimen to fulfill the mandatory drug test requirement. They were going to work with the drug testing offices in Utah to get this done before I came out, but the offices in Utah apparently don’t use any of the barcodes or identification numbers that the offices in Pennsylvania do.

I’ve been warned that the drug testing facility is very strict and, to prevent fraud, they have removed sinks from the rooms and a nurse must be present while you… provide you specimen. That has a lot of potential to be embarrassing, don’t you think? Perhaps I’ll ask the nurse if he or she would mind if I took a picture of them while I was providing my specimen? Hah hah.

Google Maps told me there was a Barnes and Noble near my hotel, so I walked to the address given and found no bookstore. Stupid Google Maps.

Lots of stuff downtown closes in the late afternoon. It’s odd, but I guess the bulk of their business is the white-collar crowd that evacuate the city at 5pm.

I was tired on Day Two because I only got about six hours of sleep between getting home from the Porcupine Tree show and getting up for work. It rained most of the day in Pittsburgh. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I wore my new Porcupine Tree hoodie as I walked to the office. It worked nicely.

At the office, I finished watching a training video I started watching the day before. I also met with another telecommuter via an online screen sharing solution and a phone call to get some training on the internal issue tracking system.

I set up MacFUSE and sshfs on my Mac laptop so that I could remotely access, via SSH, files from the main development server from my laptop. This way, I could use a graphical text editor like MacVim (gvim for OS X) to do my code edits. My officemate — the manager of all software development — suggested I blog about it on the internal developer blog. I did and that stirred up some conversation in the developer chat room.

I went to lunch with one of my co-developers and a business analyst today at a place called Storms. It was alright. The developer asked me what life was like in “semi-rural Utah,” using the words I had included in my introduction e-mail message sent to everyone yesterday. I told him about Herriman- how the population has just exploded over the last decade or so, and how there’s very little sales tax revenue because it’s mostly homes, but that’s changing, and how there are still a few farms and planted fields.

This afternoon, I attended a training meeting with several others and found it to be very educational. Also this afternoon, I committed my first changeset and submitted it to my team leader for code review.

My first day at Grant Street Group was a nice mix of gentle easing me into the water and tossing me into the deep end.

I got the expected set of papers to fill out as a new contractor and a guided tour around the office to be introduced to everyone who works there (the ratio of onsite to remote employees is swinging, but there are still a majority of onsite workers.)

I also got my new MacBook Pro and had some time to play with it, learn some ropes.

I watched most of a training video (had trouble playing it on my Mac because it was in some obscure WMV format, but finally got it to play in my Windows XP VMWare guest), got a username and password set up on most all of the systems I’ll be working with, and met (virtually) with my team leader on working with the codebase.

Before day one was over, I had a handful of issues assigned to me to address.

At lunchtime the manager over all development and another telecommuter that was in town took me to Mexico City for dinner. I was excited to have some mexican food as it is one of my favorite food genres. I was a little unsure of what to expect because my experience eating mexican in New York City a few years ago was so bad (“I ordered an enchilada.” “That is your enchilada right there.” “No, this is a quesadilla!”)

Mexico City wasn’t bad, but it definitely represents a far-from-the-border interpretation.

After work, I grabbed some dinner at Subway and took a cab to Millvale, a few miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh for the Porcupine Tree concert I had a ticket to. More on that in another posting.

I have arrived in Pittsburgh for my first of two weeks of training for my new job at Grant Street Group.

When I flew out here a couple of weeks ago for my interviews with the company, I flew on US Airways on a connecting flight through Phoenix. What was nice about that was that I got to lunch with my good friend Dave during my two-hour layover. What was not nice about that was that it was US Airways. The onboard service was just lacking all around.

I asked if I could fly on a direct flight or a different airline for this trip. Grant Street was very accomodating. In the end, I gave them the flight numbers of the Delta Airlines flights I wanted to take (I researched and found inexpensive flights that resulted in a minimum amount of travel time).

There were no direct flights available, that I could find, but one of the shorter flights went through Detroit. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about laying over in Detroit, but now that I’ve been there, I must say the Detroit Metro Airport is actually pretty nice. I expected portions of the airport to be on fire and people gathered for warmth around 55-gallon drums with burning debris in them, but it wasn’t like that at all.

I didn’t leave the airport, so I have no idea how the environment outside the airport is, but the environment inside the airport was pretty nice.

I grabbed some lunch at one of the restaurants in the airport and was a little taken back by how ambivalent and disinterested the young lady was that took my order. I mean, I’m used to that to an extent from service people at airports, but this ambivalence was cranked up (or down, as the case may be) a couple notches.

A short flight (35 minutes) from Detroit and I’m in Pittsburgh. It’s a little windy, but there’s a baseball game going on across the river from my hotel.

More to come as my stay here unfolds.

Iodynamics is, for a lack of better words, in a pickle.

A few weeks ago, we finally found our technical salesperson whom we had been searching for since May. We found a gentleman who had substantial experience in technical sales and, while not that knowledgable about open source software and Linux, knew enough about the kinds of I.T. problems companies face in today's world he could sell our products and services after taking some time to become familiar with our edge over traditional (AKA "Microsoft") approaches to problems.

We found out a couple days ago that our new salesman is quitting. Apparently, a company he'd been courting long before we talked to him, offered him an opportunity he couldn't turn away from.

I understand his decision and wish the guy the best, but it really does put us in a pickle.

Up until now, Iodynamics has managed to grow (quite well) without any dedicated sales personnel. Most of our business has come through word-of-mouth and referrals and such business contacts seem to remain loyal.

We decided in order to take our company to "the next level," we would need to start doing serious sales and marketing. Our first step was hiring a salesperson who would work with Chadd, Mike, and Dave (the partners with marketing background) to develop a sales and marketing thrust that would generate more business.

We realized in order to do this, we'd need some capital to fund our marketing efforts and pay a salesperson while they got up to speed and started making commissions. To accomplish this, we set up some business financing.

Once our salesperson was hired, we started dipping into that financing. Now we've got a balance on that debt and nothing to show for it. It's depressing and it kind of sours me on the whole idea of a hiring another sales person.

Iodynamics is currently seeking an outside salesperson and we're in a hurry, so tell your friends, your neighbors, your cellmates... anyone.

You can send this URL to people: <http://www.iodynamics.com/corporate/employment.html> or just send them this job description:

Outside salesperson

Iodynamics, a growing IT and web services company based in the Salt Lake Valley, seeks an outsides sales representative. Join the friendly staff of Iodynamics and earn an excellent salary plus commission.

Responsibilities:

• Sell the firm's products and services, which include IT support services, web design, programming, and server management.
• Prospect and pursue new leads.
• Work with existing clients to find new work and leads.
• Assist the firm in developing and maintaining marketing material and copy.
• Assist in developing the firm's overall sales and marketing strategy.

Perqs:

• Excellent, negotiable base salary (will be based on experience).
• High potential for commissions.
• Insurance benefits (after 90 days with firm).
• Lots of opportunity for success and growth with a relatively new and growing company.

Requirements:

• College degree in business-related field or equivalent experience in IT-related sales and marketing (pre-existing business contacts along Wasatch Front is a plus).
• Strong computer and Internet skills (high degree of proficiency is a plus).
• Familiarity with the products and services of the IT industry (knowledge of Open Source software and/or the Linux operating system is a big plus).
• Business-like, professional appearance and personality.
• Ability to communicate well verbally and in writing.
• Must be able to operate throughout Cache, Weber, Davis, Salt Lake, and Utah counties for 40-hour work weeks.

To apply:

Send resume in text, HTML or PDF format to iojobs-AT-iodynamics-DOT-com.

Next topic: Company

The company

Today, I spent several hours with my business partners in meetings. We scheduled this "corporate retreat" to discuss the next phase of Iodynamics' existence. It was a very productive meeting.

For the first time since I formed the company about 9 years ago, we're going to be utilizing some outside financing to help us grow over the next couple of years. When we first started discussing this, I was very nervous about it, but now I feel a lot better.

We will be bringing on some dedicated outside sales expertise and dedicated marketing expertise over the next couple of months. Up until now, we've tried to handle most of this kind of stuff ourselves, but we've realized we're too busy already to give these areas the kind of attention they deserve.

It's amazing, really, we've done as well as we have without any "real" sales and marketing. Most of our business comes in via word of mouth or referrals. We retain nearly all our customers as well.

So, all in all, I'm feeling good about the decisions that were made today.

Visiting Jennie's blog just fills me with a ton of guilt for not popuating this space in a more frequent manner. So much so that... I'm doing something about it.

One reason I haven't been blogging is because I've been working on overhauling the Fozzolog code - the code that drives this blog (and a few others). I should have been done with that a couple weeks ago, but I've been so busy with other stuff, it hasn't happened.

Other stuff? Oh, just work, mostly. Iodynamics is very busy right now. It's gratifying to look at the "Big Board" (a reference to Buffy The Vampire Slayer - Season 7) at our Salt Lake office -- it is chock full of active (Hot & Spicy) projects.

There have been three Sons Of Nothing shows in January. One in Park City and two in Colorado. These shows mark a landmark for me and the band: the first time we've run visuals and audio effects completely without the Windows operating system. Everything is running Linux now.

I'm very pleased.

We recorded the audio and video from these recent shows and I have been editing it all into some multimedia that may be usable as promotional material for the band.

Meanwhile, the rest of the band -- the actual musicians -- have been busy recording the next CD. I've been up to Matt's house to observe and document a couple of times and it's sounding great.