I May Not be Working With (Ruby on) Rails, But I Feel Like I Laid Ten Miles of Track

About two weeks later, and I'm still working like crazy, even if I'm not technically under the crunch.

With the template customization and rendering engine pretty much complete, I started work on the next batch of tasks. One was to fix some issues in the way reader comments were handled, and the other dealt with a feature request from the higher ups.

The feature request proved to be an interesting project because it involved dusting off some knowledge I had picked up on a hobby project about five years ago, and it involved learning about Amazon's web services. This is going to be a pilot project of sorts to see if some of their cloud computing services can be used to offload some background computation tasks.

I started work on the new project at the end of last week, labored on it over the weekend, and polished most of it off by the end of this week. In the meantime, I fixed the comment handling stuff so that it could make it into this week's release.

After surveying my effort, I estimate that I wrote about 900 lines of new PHP code and refactored close to 300 lines more of ugly legacy stuff. I don't keep hard statistics on coding productivity, but that's a new record for me I think. It's given me a sense of accomplishment and a case of sleep deprivation.

In a way, I am reminded of the story of crewmen for the Central Pacific Railroad setting a new record for laying miles of track in a single day.

I've got some downtime coming this weekend, and I'll be in single daddy mode because my wife decided to go pay her friend over in the Land o' Lincoln a visit to see her recently born baby boy. The next few weekends will be busy ones because I'll be working my daughters' dance recital next weekend, and then a birthday party for my older daughter, who will be turning a big five years old on the 20th, the weekend thereafter

I'll break out of the work posts this weekend, because I've got a few things to write about that I've been saving up.

Stay tuned...