Shawn on the net

I bought the T-Shirt Judge site a while ago intending to build a t-shirt rating/review site.  I started it, then ran into some problems with my software which I soon ditched with the intention of rewriting it.  There’s my first mistake and I’ll write about my problems with scorched earth development in a future post.  I’ve set the deadline for this site to be very soon as I already have a good idea of the design and there isn’t that much functionality.  Wish me luck!

Site: tshirtjudge.com

Deadline: Saturday August 2nd at 1pm GMT+10

Goals:

1. Ability to add, rate, and review tshirts

2. Ability for users to comment and rate shirts

3. Comment moderation

I’ve had a lot of extra time to code lately but I find myself going in circles bouncing between projects so starting today I’m going to start code racing.

What I mean by code racing is picking a site, setting a public deadline here then working my ass off to get a working version live by the deadline.

The deadlines will be extremely tight.  I will be working extremely hard, but I’m going to be working smart too.  At the start of each race I’ll pick a site, set the deadline, the set of goals and get started.  At the deadline I’ll be putting up finishing post detailing how I faired, and issues I ran into and what not.

So without further wait.  The first race starts tonight (Which is probably a bad idea since I have to leave in an hour for a party but I’m not scared).

Finished up Section 1 of the Pragmatic Programmers book on RubyCocoa today. Seems pretty interesting. I’ve wanted to get back into desktop development for a while now since I’ve been doing purely web development for a number of years and this seems like a great way to go about it. I’m really enjoying it so far though I’ve only just started and spent about an hour screwing around with the small examples trying different things with them.

So I added the ability to create/add modules to SansWork today. I’ve been working on quite a few sites lately with it and most of them need the same basic things. Modules allow me to provide those things. So far I’ve just implemented the User module and started a Messenger module. Other ones I plan to add later are ones to handle Groups, Forums, and Galleries.

I finally got around to uploading SansWork to github today.  SansWork is a PHP5 MVC framework I use for my personal development projects.  It’s very basic and light weight which I like but provides enough to be useful to me.  I’m not sure anyone else will be interested in it as there is already as many PHP frameworks as developers but if you find it useful let me know.

You can find it here http://github.com/sanswork/sanswork/tree/master.

Today I started reading SICP.  I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time but just never had the time.  Now that I have free time to work on my own projects and such full time I plan to finally work my way through it.  I worked through the first 17 exercises today.  I don’t think I can maintain this pace but I’m going to schedule it in for an hour of time each day even if it’s just review sessions.  I might make posts here as I go but it won’t be very in depth.  Lots of other people have done much better jobs of that when I would so if you’re interested check out http://www.kendyck.com and http://eli.thegreenplace.net/ who both appear to have excellent info.

Welcome to Shawn on the net.  What follows is my bio and details about what I plan to do here.  It’s probably not of interest to anyone but I want to put it some where so here it is.

I’m Shawn O’Neill a software developer/code monkey from Toronto, Canada.  I started my career at CGEY in England in 2001 working as a C developer for a pretty big(17 million members at the time) customer loyalty system.  After doing that for a few years I left CGEY and started my own company.  By this time most of my personal development was done in PHP and I had started writing a social networking site for companies that would allow them to leverage employee relationships to assist in sales.  I was also doing consulting and the time and landed a pretty nice gig with Virgin Trains fixing up their station issue tracking system.

Eventually I decided to move back home to Toronto and so off I went.  I landed a job with Keane Canada and Morgan Stanley working on their ETL and distributed testing teams which was ok for learning but otherwise uninteresting as I was told I was being hired to program and I ended up doing server support 100% of the time.  But I did learn a few things about databases so I’m thankful for that.

Around the same time I was launching an online community for models, photographers, and makeup artists with someone else called YourNextX.com.  I did all the development on the first two versions after which it was taken over by another two companies.  That site caused a lot of stress in my life.  I never liked the deal to transfer ownership but was forced into it.  In the end the new companies ran the site into the ground, and one of them made some pretty shady deals on the side while trying to cut us out of the profits.  We eventually got control of the site back but by then it was too far gone and my partner and I couldn’t agree on a future for it so it was wound down.

After I left Keane/MS I started working for AzoogleAds(now EpicAds) which is one of the worlds largest affiliate networks.  The team was all around my age which was new for me (in the past almost all my co-workers were at least 15-20 years older than me) and I had a blast.  I was working in PHP and we always had lots of interesting things to do and great people to do them with.  I worked for Azoogle up to the start of 2008.

After Azoogle I went to work with Evolvenetworks which was developing a dating site called LoveIsSexy.com.  The tech director was my former team lead from Azoogle and a few other developers from there were joining me so it was an exciting time.  The work was fun and interesting and I got to spend a lot of time improving on the scaling and optimization skills I’d developed working for AzoogleAds.  My co-workers were a blast too and were all very talented.  3 months or so after starting my girlfriend and I decided we wanted to take some time to travel.  We settled on Australia and as summer began in Canada and as soon as she finished teachers college we were Australia bound.

Before I left I founded SiteThree Studios Inc with a good friend and business partner in Toronto.  We have big plans for a few projects that should hopefully be out by the end of 2008.

That pretty much sums it up.  As for this site, I’m just going to use it to post what I’m currently doing development wise, and projects I’m working on, books I’m reading etc.  It probably won’t be interesting to anyone but if it is let me know.

P.S. If you want to read about my time in Australia and traveling check out http://shawnsandtawns.com