It seems that once every 1.5 years something strange occurs: I get a new blog medium. When I was in high school it started with UJournal and then Livejournal (several). When I got to college, I learned PHP and said “forget having someone elses blog, I’ll make my own.” So I did, first a Mario theme with personal entries. Then a year and a half later a more professional layout with tech posts. So what now? Now it’s time for me to start on a real medium that I don’t need to debug, and WordPress seems to be a perfect fit.

As an introduction: name is Raymond, and I’m a programmer. [That has a support group feel to it, doesn't it?] Well, a soon-to-be programmer: I’m still in college. Right now I’m up in Duluth, MN (38 below today, by the way), working part time at a paid internship for a utility company. This is the last semester of my undergraduate studies, with definite aspirations toward grad school. Fingers crossed, folks!

I prefer to do web development, and the web development that I prefer is in PHP. I’ve dabbled in Perl and C#, but I just prefer the “cowboy-style” of development that you get when you work with PHP. I’m not at the point where I want everything to be in the libraries…I want to get my hands dirty and I want to be able to optimize the calls as I see fit. Also, I want to understand security from the inside out; I don’t want “Clippy” asking for my database password and never seeing it again.

This mentality conflicts, however, with my work life. By night, hands-on defender of hardcore programming. By day, I’m an icebreaker on a slowmoving transfer from older technology to Oracle ADF using JSF/JPA and Web services. Basically, I’m the punching bag for all the little issues that go wrong when you import the wrong library or delete a file that is much more important that it appears. Everything, including the loading of libraries, are in libraries: creating a sort of M. C. Escher approach to application development. Namely: “It’s beautiful, powerful, and definitely art…..but it’s going to take me about 10 minutes to figure out whose hand that is and which flight of stairs actually gets me to the top.”