Chit_Chat/Silence Descends
SDxWiki

DWM Silence descends.

This project is always in the back of my thoughts, even when I'm not actively working on it. I feel an obligation to post some explanations, aka excuses, so that Istvan will know why activity here has dropped to nil.

Of course, I can't speak for everyone, and in fact in some cases I don't know why people aren't making an attempt to keep up some level of activity here. Speaking on my most authoratitive subject, myself, I can only say that I've been regularly working 45- to 52-hour weeks at the day job for the past few months, and I find that when I get home, I want desparately to unwind with a book or an uncomplicated online shooter. In between these, I'm compelled to at least some minimal participation in running our household. The load for the latter varies, with outdoor caretaking duties starting to become a factor as the weather finally yields to spring. (For a glimpse into the scope of my home maintenance burden, take a look at http://home.att.net/~dmuller/homestead and http://home.att.net/~dmuller/horses.html.)

I suspect that David is in a similar situation. Although I don't track his hours, he seems to be keeping me company in the middle evening at work fairl often of late. And like most people (excepting myself), he's having to balance this against a more active household that includes little people. OTOH, I know from a recent chat that he is in fact actively exploring graphic design tools for SDx.

The only other two that I can speak somewhat confidently about are John and Frank. The two of them recently put themselves forward as candidates for open management positions at Creative, on two very high-profile development teams. The two of them were competing with each other for one of the positions, and with additional internal and external candidates. Impressively, they're still talking to each other. :-) Even more impressively, each of them was promoted to one of the positions. I think this is an indication of the caliber of the SDx team members in general. I'm quite happy for both of them, and quite proud to count myself as their close colleague.

In any case, I wanted to assure everyone that this project may be sleeping at the moment, but I by no means consider it dead. I figure that this is especially important for Istvan, whose only connection to us is through this site.

JDH I'm still here - actively checking recent changes - doing some idle reading of game related links. But mostly at the moment I'm either (a) thinking about work (the new job) (b) decorating the bathroom, (c) worrying about work (d) staging my wifes new PC (don't use XP's Files & Settings transfer Wizard it's a complete waste of time!) or (e) worrying about work (I mean what the heck am I going to do now they gave me the dang job!). I don't officially start the new job until 4/29 but I'm already spending most of my time thinking about what to do and how to do it. I don't expect I'll have that much spare time for SDx initially but I do still very much want to participate - just let me get some of the kinks of the new job worked out and then I'll be back (alternatively if I don't get any of the kinks of the new job worked out then I might have a lot of time to spend on SDx (like 40 hours a week after they fire me!)

Istvan Please don't feel anyone needs to make excuses or explanations to me! I've been checking the Wiki for activity off and on, but I myself haven't had much to say lately, for a couple of reasons: (1) I've been thinking about my own work and career a lot lately, and to be blunt, it's getting me down, which reduces the flow of my "creative juices". I've also been spending a good deal of my "idle" time at work looking for new work. (2) By nature, I often work on projects by trying to reorganize the available information - one thing I'm very inclined to do is try to rehash some of the previously-constructed Wiki pages to focus our discussions (mostly toward questions I think are important and unresolved, honestly). But since I don't feel it's right to mess with the material that other team members have already written, and because I'm reluctant to add new pages that are really only slight variations on pages that already exist, inertia rules me and I do nothing. (3) When at home, I'm inclined to either do maintenance and yardwork ('tis the season) or "hide" in a book or online game (Dark Age of Camelot, as it happens). I do appreciate being given some idea of what everyone else is occupied with, though. I need to get my own house in order a bit, and I'm likely to crusade back in verbose mode.... In fact, thinking about this project more is likely to motivate me to try pushing my reeducation harder, which should improve my career change and satisfaction...

Speaking of which, it dawns on me that you folks are probably an excellent source of advice (or at least opinions!) for someone who wants to become a junior programmer. There are quite a few excellent tools I could educate myself to use, either through a self-taught route, or through some formal courses. I've been thinking C++/Perl, but I'm right by a Sun Microsystems regional HQ, through which I could easily take (expensive) courses and get certified in Java. Any opinions on the relative value? I've also been looking at Python, which seems to have some intersting potential, though I don't believe employers are generally to that level of the bleeding edge, which inclines me to stick with Perl for a generally-useful interpreted scripting language. There's also PHP, for web delivery and I dunno what else, but I've not learned squat about it other than that it supposedly has C-like syntax, and that Gossip (Carlo Zottman - PlanetJumpgate) thinks it's gloriously wonderful. I'm figuring XML is worth the trip, the basic tutorials I've read are painless. A related problem for me is that my liberal arts degree and I will be competing for entry-level positions with CS majors fresh out of school. Besides facility with languages and tools, what do development professionals think I should know in order to be viable? Rather than letting me hijack this page further, please feel free to shoot me email. Thanks for any opinions and advice offered!

JDH To address a couple of points you raised: (1) I agree that no one owes anyone an excuse but, like you, I like to know what's up with my fellow SDxers - it keeps a sense of a shared community going. Some of our members seem to be less inclined to post general tidbits than others - but I'd like to encourage everybody to post something every now and then - IMO it helps keep SDx real. (2) Don't worry about editing others work - that's the point of the wiki - act first and ask permission later. If anyone really objects to someones edits then we can always get back to an earlier version (via the [View other revisions] link that's on every page). A major goal of wikis is to support collabrative editing - it is a major stumbling block for us to get over but I think the benefits are worth it. Short version: Go for it! (3) I'd like to start a debate on So what skills should a developer possess (oops I just did!) - I think using the wiki for this is better than individual e-mails and I'd love to hear what my peers think on this subject. We're nowhere near our bandwidth or capacity limits so there's no need to be concerned about "hijacking a page" (although don't be shy about starting a new page - also a major wiki strength) - the only thing I wonder is if this page might not better belong on our public wiki - but I resisted that because I think by having it here we have more chance of getting some SDxers to post. (4) I'm sorry that you've got the "My Job Sucks!" blues - we've all been there. I spent a lot of time there over the last 18 months or so. Now, like a complete dilitante, I'm at the other end of the spectrum - I'm completely geeked about the new job. Good luck with whatever you decide and I think you'll find this group very willing to help you if you decide to learn any particular technology.