DarqByte

I’m experiencing one of those random slowdowns that we get at my work from time to time. Usually I’ve got a pretty hefty workload of things to do, so I’m always working on something or talking to somebody or what have you. But my task list this week is pretty bare.

Actually, this is going to be an interesting week indeed. My boss is out this entire week in Jamaica (the bastard! ) and that leaves me pseudo-in charge. Well, probably not. I’m not really in charge of the other guys on my development team, although by default everything tends to funnel through me anyway because our business side and other people need a central contact point for our group.

So I’ve already been dealing with meetings and meeting requests that normally go to my boss, and had to field questions that normally go to him. I actually welcome this kind of stuff. I was talking to Laura last night about how I’m really looking forward to this week because I get to do some of the things that lead developers around here get to do, which is the position I currently aspire to.

So learning a little bit here and there about what my boss does that I didn’t already know. He’s been gone before and I’ve been “the guy” before in those cases, but some things in our group and our business side are a little different than they were the last time I fulfilled this capacity, so it’s always interesting stuff. I relish new challenges and growth in my career, so this has been exciting, even if it’s temporary and my boss is,a t this point, better at it than I am because he’s been at it longer (and he’s just in general a good boss anyway).

And now I get to deal with one of our vendors becoming inaccessible… Something he normally does… Be back soon…

Holy crap… They’re down for the count… I’ve already called them and gotten a response saying “Yeah, we’re having network issues.” And now we play the waiting game, where about 80% of all of our transactions time out…

And they’re back. They were down for almost 40 minutes. That’s crazy bad. We had tons, absolute tons of calls time out and probably caused our clients to lose a decent chunk of change per transaction. WTG…

So anyway, back to learning. In addition to learning (and doing) some of the stuff that my boss normally does, since my workload is relatively light, I also have to opportunity to take some time and learn version 2.0 of my co-worker’s code for the system he is primarily responsible for.

He’s a smart cookie. Getting to delve into his new code base has taught me a few things about some design patterns I’m not using, as well as the Zend Framework that he uses heavily. He also likes using the Reflection feature of PHP, something I don’t use particularly often.

I might know a lot about PHP and be a certified PHP engineer, but there’s always room to learn, especially from him. I do enjoy learning, especially if it’s something I’m interested in and have the time for.