Category: Office Life

Things have been really crazy and busy at work this week…we’re trying to get a release out the door by the end of this week, so a lot of extra stuff that needs to get done in between…I’ve been at work late every day this week, but then again, maybe that’ll works out even since I’ll need to leave early next Friday to go camping.

At work we’ve had pizza twice this week. Its actually been perfect timing both times too, because it was on the exact days I had no idea what I was going to do for lunch and hadn’t brought anything and figured I’d have to go pick something up. One of the pizza lunches was a thank you for a bunch of us assisting another project team, and the other was celebrating the end of an office weight loss challenge.

So work’s going pretty good…I’m really enjoying what I’m working on, I haven’t been doing as much work with actual (cell-phone) handsets lately, but none-the-less having fun. I’m working with two very different phones right now, an LG touch handset and a very basic Samsung feature phone.

Right now I’m working on adding/testing the features for touch-enabled handsets to the J2ME edition of the app. This entails things such as making sure we have all the right images and requesting any missing ones from the art department, setting up a configuration file that specifies all the fonts, fixing lots of little bugs like re-positioning the buttons so that the larger buttons (that a fat-finger can press) fit on the screen, ripping out unnecessary code so I don’t have to fix other issues in twelve places, etc.

Basically I’m just doing all that little fun stuff that makes the app just…work…knocking out one bug or problem after another until it is ready to submit to QA. There are lots of little things that go into making the big thing work.

Monday they rearranged the office. My new desk is, now that all the dust has settled, probably in a nicer location than my old one. Plus, I got just enough more space for an extra bookshelf for all those heavy programming books to go on.

I finished the assignment I was working on earlier this week (a bug where songs were being cut off by 5-10 seconds one out of every 3-5 times roughly)…and now I’m on to writing new code to re-skin the app…kind of fun.

email from my boss this morning 🙂

if (user.access == false) {
    servlet.bellyUp(); 
    spew(gibberish); 
    user.clueless = true; 
}

Makes perfect sense to me… (because you would have obviously known “null input” or “500 internal server error” means you need to fill out a form to request access to that website, right?)

Yesterday I woke up to a flurry of emails flooding my (work) inbox about the big (not so good) news at Sun about some major upcoming layoffs…like 5000-6000 people over the next year….(that’s approximately a 15-18% reduction in staff, quite a bit bigger than their 1000 person layoff in July)…first it was the internal/confidential announcement to employees (though nothing I’m saying here that isn’t pretty much all over the mainstream media now already anyway), followed by links to a video announcement from the CEO, and then a flurry more emails about their simultaneous restructuring and how your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss now reports to someone different, and everyone in between the six layers of management sending out “Today’s announcements and you” emails.

In the immediate sense my boss reassures our team again that our team that Netbeans is a key component of Sun’s strategy going forward. And within Netbeans, the web-tier is the particular part where I work…the internet ain’t going away anytime soon…tools for authoring websites and web-applications? Definitely on par with the wave of where the internet’s going…maybe that’s why we’re now under the “cloud computing” group. Not to say everywhere under the web-tier is a good place to be, but where I am is supposed to be a good place…