Moving on

brad — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:00:51 +0200

Yesterday I posted off my signed letter of acceptance for a job offer from Open Voice. On October 1 I submitted my letter of resignation from Rhodes University. This means the Whijos are moving to the bottom end of the Cape, to take up residence in South Africa's mountain capital, Cape Town.

What prompted this? I was approached by Open Voice a few weeks ago, with an expressing of interest in me, this was due to a reference from Jonathan Hitchcock. They were looking for someone to be their web guy, someone with strategy and skills (and handsome, if possible). I am that guy, and I think they stole the job description from my head, because it fits me like a whole human glove. They are also offering an improvement in my salary which fits me a lot better, and the opportunity of working in Cape Town (which I have been fantasising about for quite a long time), with trips to JHB (I don't hate Johannesburg, I just don't want to live there). I am not only a money whore, there are a few reasons why this makes sense as a move:

Room for growth in the job (Academic structures are fixed, unmoving, and quite tall)
A better fit to my skills and potential
Very little bureaucracy to deal with
Cape Town has cool things like geekdinners, podcamps, campcamps, pylug, clug, mugs, vegetables and assorted goods.
Cape Town improves property purchasing options because there is more of it
It could be a spring board into some work overseas

So, what about the leaving Rhodes part of the equation? I am unhappy to leave Rhodes:

We were starting to get settled in in Grahamstown, so this move is means yet another tipsy turvy 6-8 months in a time in my life when I would like to live somewhere for more than 1 year, and have a vegetable garden, friends, and more
There are some cool projects hanging around in the NML which I would like to work on, and improve (like Cue, grocotts online, etc.)
Grahamstown is a small town, and living 3 minutes from my house is going to be hard to match
Friends
Ratatouille humble pies from BP

I am happy to leave Rhodes because:

Rhodes and higher education are in a quagmire (a few, actually) that means they cannot compete with industry rates for skilled people (industry is paying between 2 and 4 times RU)
Rhodes and higher education institutions have an established and comfortable senior academic class which places a glass ceiling on growth, interest and integration on junior staff.
Academic institutions have so much red tape and bureaucracy (partly because of the senior academics, partly because they are big institutions, and partly because they have limited budgets). This red tape makes me want to gouge my eyes out, and I back away faster than anything from problems that may brush up against policy, simply because my energy is better spent on other things.
It is time to leave Grahamstown, since I have been here for a long time now
Grahamstown is a small town, and some times you just can't buy the things you want, and things take longer, and its quaint and frustrating
I don't have peers who speak the same language as me for a high portion of my skillset, so I miss speaking geek, and doing geek, with geeks

There are lots of complexity things involved in this whole lot, but we decided the move was in a good direction, I am happy but fearful, Mandy is happy but fearful, and we are on a journey to a new and interesting part of our lives.

Even when you are winning (Drupal vs. Mambo, Germalism, Django, Schools, more bean)

brad — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 15:45:25 +0200

You haven't heard from me in a while because I have been pretty darn busy. So, what have I been busy with? lots...and to be a dork, I will lump the unrelated together in this monumental post:

Drupal and MamboJoomla?
I have been doing some free-lance work here and there. Lots of CMS setting up, notably, lots of Drupal. After using Mambo for a long time, and dealing with hacks here and there to get it to behave in a sane manner wears one down. I cannot vouch for if Joomla has improved the sif codebase that Mambo runs on, but I know Drupal is the closest you can come to a good multi-purpose CMS that Doesnt make your head burn when problem solving. I don't want to say that the many hours that went into making Mambo were wasted. It is very clear that Mambo started as something, grew into something else, got released as open source, and became something else, split into two competing products (Mambo/Joomla), etc. Drupal, on the other hand, is community plumbing. It started out as community plumbing, grew into better community plumbing, and has a very interactive community, built using...Drupal. If you want a clear illustration of where Mambo/Joomla fails download yourself a mambo module, and a drupal module. Open the two codebases (in parallel, or series), and notice how the joomla/module has No style, no API it is adhering to, behaving generally like a wild west php script. Notice how drupal module has an API it adheres to, notice how it can augment many different areas in the engine. Drupal starts as an engine, you plug modules into it, and it becomes a CMS, or a Blog, or a community advocacy site. Mambo/Joomla is a piece of bad ex-commercial monolithic code which heard about plugins during one of it's augmentations.

What I do know is that Drupal is incredibly easy to work with, well documented, stable, and current. It cuts my web development time in half. In fact the work I normally have to do lands in building a theme (using any one of the templating engines available), installing and configuring a few specific modules, and smiling a lot. I think there is probably enough business in just building themes for drupal. For web development...Inkscape++, Drupal++.
Germalisms
I have been lecturing some Germalisms (or Journalists) in XHTML and CSS (plus some mentions of Web 2.0.1b rc3 stuffs). I have been using our local Moodle installation to build up the course and so on. Obviously I did my homework, and being an advocate of standards where possible, I looked into using s5: A Simple, Standards-Based, Slide Show System within moodle. Good news is it is possible. What does all that jibber jabber mean? well, using an s5 plugin for moodle means I can create lecture slides on moodle, and they will run in any web browser. I don't need a proprietry product, I don't even need a fancy web browser, I can actually build the slides using my cellphone (if the urge gripped me) from anywhere in the world. Sure it doesnt have fancy effects (it can be easily augmented to have some fancy effects), but it allows me to build good looking slides quickly and easily, without ever leaving my browser. that is k-rad. Up yours proprietry-vendor-of-your-choice.

The kids are cool, but we have only had two lectures so far, what with me being in Dwesa last week, and them being in jhb this week. It is going well though. We have pet names and everything. Well, not so much, but we could. Some may take offense at me calling them Germalisms, but it is a pet name some of us have for Journalists, I am a victim of circumstances.
Djangalising
Another highlight in my life has been wrapping my keys around some Django. Django is a web application framework written in the (imho) best-language-around python. I am currently writing a custom app for the Freedom League. Mambo has been seriously deficient at this task, and I felt that building a custom app was the way to go. Django makes a lot of life easy. It does take ten minutes to do the basic core code, but it obviously takes longer to develop an application, with bells and whistles. I have been bad in not posting any code snippets etc. but I haven't had the inclination to spend the time on such things. The project is going to be open sourced as soon as possible, but i want to get it up and running, have a people use the site, improve it, get some peeps to review it, and then release it. Either way, python, and Django, have improved my outlook on webdevelopment even more. The exciting things about Django include easy scaling up, high response times (i.e. higher than any web framework in php, j2ee, etc.), easy interactions with multiple database backends, abstracted modelling code, plenty of freebies (like the admin module, comments, multiple markdown syntaxes, powerful templating). There are arguments for different web frameworks, and they are nice, but Django is a comfort zone that I like. I tried Ruby on Rails, knowing no ruby, and got pretty far, but very frustrated. I tried Django, knowing no python, and got most places I wanted to get. Django++
Schools
A significant portion of my time has been dedicated to the e-Yethu schools project. Besides the technical side of things (helping schools get things done), the project is having increasing interactions with the Department of Education in the Eastern Cape. We are starting to produce documents which are of use to the department. They have to cater for lots of schools getting computer labs by 2013, like all of them. We can, and are, presenting them with research and knowledge which has grown from our actual experience working with the schools in grahamstown. We can discuss multiple lab setups with expertise (Thin clients, Fat clients, Dual boot thick and thin clients, Windows networks managed by Open source software, school relevant open source software on linux and windows), as well as connectivity issues (Modem, DSL, Wireless (wifi and wimax), GPRS/EDGE/HDPSISASAAS). It is nice that we are producing something worthwhile, building our own experience and knowledge. Without the work that came before us we would be nowhere, and now we are trying to ensure that the work we and others are doing can be used to the benefit of lots of school kids.
Bean and Amanda are the underlying current of my life. We have a reasonably strong indication that Bean is a girl, although I think people are seeing chickens before the eggs crack. Becoming a parent brings a whole wealth of experiences and worries, but it seems like together we are getting somewhere. I cannot wait till bean is born and I take the time off to spend with Mandy and bean. The prospect of a long holiday at the end of the year, spent getting to know my spawn and all of it's crying-spitting-shitting-ness is going to be rad. It seems like everyone else is more worried about what-is-going-to-happen than me, or worrying for me. The nice thing is that there is nothing to worry about, because it will work out fine in the end. I think people will only believe me when I am old enough to embarrass bean. I am already old enough to. I will know my work is paid off when my child tells me "you are such a dork". Because, I am ;)

lecturing

Moving on

Even when you are winning (Drupal vs. Mambo, Germalism, Django, Schools, more bean)