Work

I resigned from my previous job on October 2007 and spent a little over 4 months unemployed.  In February 2008 Alienware corp. came knocking on my door asking if I wanted to take a temporary opportunity with them.  After a skills test and some interviews I was hired to start working right away.  The first week was very awkward since I wasn’t really told what my role was in the company, but after the second week I had a clear task which was that of working on a foundation for the new Alienware site.  By foundation I mean making templates, CSS and javascript for the new site based on mockups that they had.

After studying their site structure back then I decided to take the new site in another direction, I wanted to implement the use of both CSS and javascript frameworks.  My choice was met with skepticism but ultimately I was allowed to do a lot of the front-end development as I pleased.  After a month and a half of work more team members started working on the site as well, at which point, things started to get out of my control and although the end result is not exactly what I imagined, a lot of my original concepts made it to the end.

After the new site was launched my role with the company became a question mark again.  After talking with the director of our department and more skills test I was assigned the role of Flash UI developer as a full-time employee.  That meant that from then on I would have to work mostly on ActionScript 3, something I’ve never used before, but thanks to my computer science background I was able to pick up quicklly.

In my eyes the biggest accomplishment so far, at Alienware, was working on their new site.  The second biggest accomplishment was a little project that came out of one of our team meetings and its called AlienSurface.  AlienSurface is Alienware’s wallpaper maker which allows people to make wallpapers with Alienware assets right on their browser.  It was a project that took me a little over two months from the moment of conception to final release.  I wish I could be able to work on it to fix some bugs and improve it but unfortunately I have not been allowed to go back to it due to other projects on my plate.

School

After two years out of college I decided to go back to work on my MBA degree.  I started one of FIU’s MBA program in the summer of 2008 and so far I’m really enjoying the program.  I must say that It is not all good though, there are some things that I really don’t like but they are out of my hands.

The first thing is online classes, they really annoy me.  I feel that there is hardly any interaction with my other peers and the professor(s), I think that the whole point of an MBA program is to work in teams.  Working in teams is what a person would most than likely encounter in the real world, the lack of interaction really brings down the class to just a pass the exam type of mentality which is not good in my opinion.  The counter argument that the school brings up all the time is the lack of funds to have real classes (at least in the summer) which is a good argument.  But nonetheless I’m not happy with the decision of having online classes in the curriculum at all.

The second thing that really annoys me is the attitude of some of the students in the program.  I shouldn’t be judging them but there are some students who are just there to pass and “get a raise”.  I personally think they bring the rest of the students down.  Moreover when one has to work with them in team projects, they don’t contribute as much as other team members. I must say that most of the teams I’ve worked on have members who are eager to go far and beyond the task we are given, but I’ve had teams in which half the team doesn’t really care about the outcome.

Misc

In 2008 I also tried to get myself more involved with technology gatherings like FOWA Miami 2008, Ruby Enthusiast meetings and web development meetings.  However I definitely have to attend more of these events since the amount of talent in South Florida is growing and I want to be part of it.

What I Missed

There are some things I wanted to accomplish last year but couldn’t for various reasons.  One of them was getting a new car,  I already have a somewhat new car (’07 model) but I wanted a newer one (I’m so shallow, I know).  The second thing is that I wanted to develop a better source of passive income, unfortunately due to my busy schedule and some lazyness on my part I wasn’t able to achieve this goal.  These two goals are now one of the highest priorities for this year, so lets see what happens.  I think 2009 will be a very exciting year for me, at least it’s been exciting so far.   How was your 2008 and what are you looking forward to do in 2009?

Anyhow, in about a month (after I get a new computer), I will test the waters of selling templates. I’ll make a simple template and I’ll put it on Theme Forest, which seems to be the most simple way to showcase and sell themes right now; and although I’m not raving about the payout structure I still think its fair enough.

The question now is, what kind of template to make? I’m personally not too happy with Joomla development so I think that one is out and I’ve never worked with Drupal so that one is out too. That leaves me with a plain html template and WordPress, I think both take about the same time to develop, so by looking at the current popularity of WordPress I think it would be smart to start out making a template for WordPress.

In conclusion, my target will be to make a simple WordPress template(ie. no support for widgets unless I change my mind) and trying to sell it between $10 and $15 dollars on Theme Forest. Hopefully after two months on the market I would have gathered enough information to either make me want to make another template or make me look elsewhere for passive income sources. I’ll try to write report by Jan 09 with the results of this experiment.

When others ask me how happy I am with the end result I always reply that I’m about 70% happy.  I know I could have improved many things but constrains and time are always the enemy.  However I think that the current state of the site is a pretty darn good foundation for whatever we decide to build on the future.  I also feel happy that Mr Dell(big boss) himself said he liked the look and feel of the new site.  Also I glanced thru some message boards and the general consensus is that people like it.

So what does the future hold?  Well I’ve taken it upon myself to improve the speed of the site and rethink my not so good ideas.  And hopefully I’ll get some time to relax now that I’ve crossed the first big hurdle at Alienware and while I wait for the next big thing.

About Two months ago I read in one of the forums that I frequent a post by someone looking for help setting up a site. At the time, I did not have a full-time job per se, so I was interested in jumping into projects just to get my name out there and to try different technologies that I might not see in a regular basis.

So Jonas, who wanted to build the site, told me his idea of having a site to post pictures and articles about exotic car collections. I thought the idea had potential so I decided to help him start the site. I proposed Joomla for the back-end as I did not have the time to build a whole site from scratch. However I had never done a full blown website using Joomla before; I had only experimented with it on a few occasions but nothing serious. Anyhow after some difficulties at the beginning I got to set up all the components and basic foundation to have the site working the way we wanted; all while Jonas learned the ins and outs of Joomla since he was going to take care of the content and day-to-day site management. Long story short we released Exotic Car Collections last week to the public.

So far no major problem has arise, but as with every project something will eventually come up. I do hope that we can improve the quality and usability of the site as time allows; but I see it difficult as I just started my Graduate Degree last week and my job’s work load is steadily increasing. Regardless I’ll try to find time to keep polishing the project.

If you have any comments, suggestions or a question that you would like to see answered in an upcoming episode on the Alien Network just submit a comment or hit me up thru the contact form.

Thats all for now, I’ll post later on today after we go live.

Alien Network goes live April 29, 2008 @ 3pm EST

update: Well its 11pm and I finally watched the episode. I think it that it was kind of monotone as some people commented over at Engadget. But I must admit that the idea has potential, hopefully the episodes will get better over time.

I found this post on digg and thought that I share almost all of this persons views of who is a good programmer.

I particularly agree on his view of self-learning. I know many programmers who complain about new technologies and dont want to learn it unless they are sent to a course or the company invests in (pays) them to learn a new technology.

A good programmer doesn’t need a training course to learn a new technology. In fact, the great programmer will be the one talking your ear off about a new technology that you haven’t even heard of, explaining to you why you must use it in your business, even if none of your staff knows how to use it. Even if it’s a technology he doesn’t know how to use yet.