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What do I do?

I often get the feeling that most people have no idea what I do down in this dungeon. Here’s a sample:

In the next hour, I will write, test and prove some php and JavaScript+jQuery to present a table of data, allow a user to click a delete icon, use a modal to prompt for delete confirmation, then remove the data from the database and the row from the table without a page refresh. Will work in IE6, 7, Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

This is also a micro-milestone. I often write these down, although I rarely publish them, when the number of tasks I have is overwhelming, or I have coder’s block, or I need motivation. Giving yourself small, achievable milestones can lead to great productivity.

Update: Had a digression. To get the new code to work I had to upgrade jQuery’s UI from 1.5.3 to 1.7.1. This was well worth the effort. They’ve done a great job with 1.7.1!

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Pet Projects

Every developer needs a pet project. In a decade of writing code for other people I have had some fantastic ideas and even a couple of false starts but never truly had a pet project. My excuse has always been that I was waiting for a lull between projects to be able to write my own but there is no such thing. Either you jump from one project to another or from a project to marketing for another project. I’ve decided that I will steal away 15-30 minutes a day, no more, to work on my own pet project. For the project, I have chosen The Perfect Job. This evening I will take 15-30 minutes and simply decide between custom coding all functionality of the site versus incorporating it into a CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, Django, or Drupal. As I work through the build out of The Perfect Job, I will blog each 15-30 minute session here.