Starting over again after so long
It's been such a long time since I've last written one of these things. Ever since I started my career in software, everything has been such a blurry haze most of the time. There were times when I lost sight of who I was, what I was doing this for and for whom.
I'm lucky enough to have had people around me that to remind me, and at other times, hit me over the head, whenever I strayed too out of line. They kept my feet firmly on the ground as I try to sail this chaotic economy.
So where have I been?
Well, if anyone cares to know, I spent most of last year working for a mobile games company. It was some of the greatest days of my life. I moved out. I was able to learn so much, make great friends and finally feel like I am among my people.
But that came at a cost.
Six day workweeks. Twelve to sixteen hour workdays. Having to report directly to the CEO while being assigned to tasks which have a direct impact on the operations of the company. All while having to juggle personal, fillial and romantic responsibilities all at once.
It proved too much for me, the former shut-in. Something was bound to break, and I fucked up so bad that I was already dead in the eyes of the owner for two months by the time I was let go.
Losing the lodging that came with the post meant I had to move back in with my parents. They were understanding enough, but I can't help but feel their disappointment. Or maybe I'm just projecting my own emotions on to them.
Where am I at now?
Having decided to go all in on the career shift from the call center industry to finally doing software development professionally as opposed to just being a hobby, I was able to get another position for a IT services company that does web development and backend process support for international clients. The work is rewarding, although I do have a lot of reservations about the business, that I keep mostly to myself, them being basically a data broker, and all that.
... Something something belly of the beast...
Anywho.. I wish to do more of these as it helps get some anxieties out of my head into something i could process. Both in the psychological sense in that this is therapy and mentally stimulating for me, and the computational sense in that I'm looking at redoing my memex using a mix of plain HTML, PHP and Sqlite.
Wait what?!
For those who've seen me around on this weird part of the internet would know I'm a big lisp/emacs lifeform. I still am. I'm writing this using emacs right now. However, something I keep thinking about is whether or not my writing and the things I've learned will be in an accessible form for the long term.
While the obvious solution to the archival dilemma is to write a goddamn dead-tree book, the next best thing is to have them in files in a readily accessible format. In today's case, that means web pages like this.
However, that clashes with my desire to make my scattered thoughts be more than just a collection of writings, I want them to be a dynamic, living repository of the things I have learned. Especially so that I don't have the best memory in the world.
It's fortunate that HTML is a subset of XML, which allows me to embed arbitrary data structures into the very content of this record without getting in the way of its human-readable format.
This allows me to write a spider that can record all of that embedded data and save them into a sqlite database. Using that collected data, I can use PHP's built-in templating capabilities to display, analyze and visualize interconnected data from across all of my writing.
To this end I'll slowly encode my old writings to this format as well as write the indexer and spider for building the dynamic parts of this record.
With that out of the way, hello again.