Month: June 2005

On hiring programmers

Ovid, who is a rather famous Perl programmer himself, has a few tips about hiring programmers for companies who want to do so. Before reading the article, try writing your own ad for Perl programmer position available. Than see if you’ve got it right.

The main thing you want out of an ad is for people to read it. If you have nothing compelling in the ad, the people who will read and respond are the unemployed or the unsatisfied. Why overlook the competent, happy programmers? You want everyone reading your ad.

The Trac Project

Here is a quote from The Trac Project website:

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission; to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team’s established development process and policies.

I haven’t tried it myself yet, but the functionality sounds interesting. Did anyone try it?

Email frustration

Since my office workstation is dead, I have to use a terminal for the time being. While I have all the functionality available, things don’t feel the same, as I have to configure and reconfigure things to my likings. One of my biggest frustrations was with email.

Email is an important part of my job. I get a few thousand emails daily. These include alarms and notifications, mailing lists, reports, log analyzers, tickets and requests, and correspondence with colleuges and customers. I have a very fine tuned system that helps me to process all of these messages in a reasonable amount of time. By reasonable I mean less than two hours per day.

With my workstation going down, my excellent email system became unavailable. I had to switch to an emergency set of tools. And that wasn’t as easy as I thouhgt it would be. In fact, I realized how complex my email setup was, but I thought that I could manage without it, albeit in a wider time span.

Continue reading Email frustration

Sounds of love

One of the things I love about taking Maxim for walks in the park every day is how I get new experiences. I never actually went for a walk in the morning until I had to with Maxim.

What is so different in the morning? Well, everything actually. Streets and buildings look different, people are different, smells and sounds are different.

Especially sounds. Especially if that’s one of those quiet Sunday mornings, like today.

What can I hear at 8:00am on Sunday that I can’t hear at any other day or any other time? You’ll never guess. I can hear people having sex. Lots of them. Everywhere!

Bedroom windows are often open in the mornings, before the air gets too hot. There are no traffic noises. And people are not in a hurry to their jobs. All of these make sex very hearable.

It’s only about 10 minutes walk from our apartment to the park, but today I’ve heard at least five different couples having sex. And today is just a regular Sunday like any other…