Hey Susie!
Not posting much lately but when I encounter an inarticulate diatribe regurgitating an oft-repeated refrain like that, I can't help myself. I did end up doing a lot of back-spacing before hitting Submit, though.
Today is the 3rd time in only 2 weeks that I've uttered the incredible statement "I'm heading to the office to get some programming done before I start dealing with my job."
Is it pretty cool on that end of the screen our having a fulltime programmer now?
Even cooler that despite a lot of worries I saw stated here and on SI that everything would get changed just for change's sake, to see that Clem and company roll just like us and the few changes have been behind-the-scenes improvements?
For my part, I'm even busier and more over-worked now than I was previously, but very little of what I do each day is the same stuff I was doing a couple of months ago. Now I'm furiously conducting several bands rather than playing a bunch of instruments at the same time in one band. And conducting a score I'm instrumental (pun intended) in composing rather than ad-libbing my playing.
I'm working many more hours than I used to and it's even cutting into the hobby I love more than anything else. Funny thing is it doesn't have to. I let it. Because I've got the kind of job satisfaction I haven't experienced here since the early days when I came aboard and my mandate was simply "Make this a viable business using a paper clip and two clothespins." Now it's "Grow, and you can have anything you need to make it happen."
Hence, Meatloaf, as part of what's needed. As programmers go, Grubmaster and I are definitely upper echelon, but we're also kids in a sandbox compared to Meatloaf.
And the verbage added to the public posting page and PM's to Matt and Dave? The beginning of a three-pronged approach to getting Matt and Dave in control of their jobs rather than vice-versa. Lighten the load, segregate parts of the workload, and hire a person or people to help with some of the segregated parts.
On the technical front, Meatloaf is still wrestling with the new web-server trying to get it to play nice, and it's actually gratifying to see he's having the same problems with it that I was. Though I'm sure he'll find a solution. Just hope it's before the current webserver starts slowing down. And the programming I'm doing is a complete rewrite of our busiest routine, read_msg. I expect to put it into production Wednesday evening, and can't wait to see what it does to CPU utilization. I wouldn't be surprised to see the webserver's workload drop from its current 55-60% to something like 45%, which would be about a 30% workload on the new server, buying us enough time to get this all rewritten in .NET and easily deployed on multiple webservers. Keeping fingers crossed.
Speaking of multiple webservers, another project in the works (early stages right now) is getting us moved to a new ISP and with a far better, nearly bullet-proof infrastructure. High-quality equipment and lots of it. We use excellent equipment now as far as servers go, but we'll be using lots more of it to give us incredible redundancy and room to grow.
And along with the new ISP comes a second office literally feet away from the computers that run the sites, giving us room for more employees, such as the customer support person we're going to look for soon to provide extra coverage for the London side of things and help with Matt and Dave's workload (easy stuff like password and alias changes, changing moderators, etc).
So, things have changed very dramatically for me, they're in the process of changing for the site itself (though mostly transparently until we start adding ADVFN's incredible tools), and I'm working on getting them changed for Dave and Matt so we can become supersites without burning the poor guys out.
Well, got some programming to do. The new read_msg is very nearly done. All I've got left to do on it is making it correctly (and efficiently) handle ignored and deleted messages. I've gotten into the habit of using the new one myself because it's actually noticeably faster than the current one. With any luck, I can put it into production this evening and use tomorrow to fix the inevitable problems that will crop up before heading out of town Thursday for my last track weekend of the season.
