Ntro’s Official Opinion

Listen.
Lyrics

This song pretty much sums up 40-50 hours of a typical week for me.

I’ve got to figure something out, guys.

This article is one of the most depressing things I have read in a while. I recommend you take a look, but for those of you who are far too busy, the basic gist is that regular full-time jobs are for people who are not smart enough to make money any other way, and that any reasonably intelligent person should never have one. Instead, we should aspire to decouple our income from the amount of effort we exert obtaining that income.

Well, I consider myself reasonably intelligent, so I’ve decided that I’m not going to take it anymore. Don’t get me wrong, my current employer doesn’t mistreat me, but the fact remains that I am employed by someone, and I don’t think that’s what I’m meant to do.

Now I just need to figure out what it’s going to take to make this transition happen. I have a hundred ideas, and for each idea there are a hundred reasons why it won’t work. I guess I need to stop being so negative and just start doing something.

I’m in Las Vegas this week for this thing, and just procured internet access, so hopefully I’ll be updating throughout the week.

This trip isn’t strictly business; I’ll probably be checking out the Star Trek Experience at the Hilton, and hopefully figure out how to play some Texas Hold’em for less than $40 a hand.

Monday was my first day at the new job, and so far it has been going well. The first couple of hours were spent setting up my computer and cubicle, taking the official office tour, and meeting people whose names and positions I don’t remember.

The next 15 minutes were a brief introduction to the data model, and an even more brief description of a query that has a severe performance issue. Apparently the query was the result of a last-minute requirement last Friday, and hadn’t really been tuned yet. After lunch, I took at look at the query, which was actually a function which queried a view which executed another function which queried another view which . . . I didn’t get that far. After sifting through the source for a while, I found part of the problem and improved the performance of the query by a couple hundred percent.

This is nothing to brag about, really. No one was stumped by the issue, because no one had taken time to analyze it, and any of the other developers would have been able to discover the problem if given the chance. But, the chance was given to me, and I was able to work with it and be productive, something I didn’t expect to do on my first day. This made its way up to my boss’ boss’ boss, which earned me a few pats on the back that afternoon. That was nice.

Other than that, I’m working on the Oracle DBA transition. More on (pun intended) that in a future post.

Friday is my last day with my current employer, and an interesting phenomenon is taking place. I turned in my resignation the Friday before last, and since then there has not been an official announcement of my departure. Instead, the news has traveled through the grapevine.

This has made my final days uncomfortable for a few reasons. It’s obvious that everyone knows by now, but very few people have actually congratulated me or affectionately called me a “short-timer” in passing. So, when I stop in the kitchen for coffee, I end up having conversations like this:

Guy in the kitchen: Hey, how’s it going?
Ntro: I’m doing alright, how are you?
Guy: I’m fine.
[ more than a few seconds of silence ]
Ntro: So, did you hear my news?
Guy: No, what news?
Ntro: I’m leaving in two weeks.
Guy: Oh, yea, that. I heard about that, but I wasn’t going to say anything.
Ntro: . . .
Guy: Well, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
* Guy leaves.
* Ntro leaves.

That was it. I asked another person the same question over IM, and his response was “;)“. I’m still not really sure what that means.

If I were in charge, and someone like me resigned, I would have immediately sent out an email like this:

All,

Ntro has decided to part ways with our company.
He is leaving on good terms, so there’s no reason
to tip-toe around this. If you pass him in the hall,
wish him luck in the future.

That would have avoided any ambiguity about the motivations behind my resignation, whether or not I was “asked to leave” (I wasn’t) and, most importantly, make the subject approachable and eliminate the awkwardness that inevitably arises when your major source of information is the rumor mill. Instead, what we have is a situation in which everyone knows, but they all think they are not supposed to know, and therefore it is treated like secret information.

Normally, I’m not bothered by awkward silence. In fact, most of the time I would rather be left alone. However, recently I’ve discovered that I don’t have an aversion to conversation, I just don’t like small talk. If I have news to share, I like talking about it with almost anyone. That’s why these last few days have been so miserable– I have big news, and everybody knows about it, and therefore I am accosted in order to discuss it. But, therein lies the conflict. No one received an official announcement, and no one is willing to admit that they were discussing my news behind my back, so I either have to bring it up or it is not discussed. I don’t, of course, and then the small talk starts.

Are you beginning to see how this might be uncomfortable?

Who knows. Maybe on Friday we’ll have a party in the kitchen with nachos and cheap chicken wings. That would make up for everything.

I’m starting a new job next Monday at a small firm in Addison as a DBA and Senior Developer. It’s going to be interesting, as it’s a .NET/WinForms/ASP.NET (Microsoft’s “New Stuff”) shop, and I’m accustomed to Unixy solutions. At least the Oracle database is on Sun Solaris, but there’s talk of migrating to SQL Server.

The purpose of this post is to share my official opinion on Microsoft and .NET. As a supporter of Linux and OSS, a general assumption people have is that I consider anyone and anything Microsoft evil. Though I haven’t bothered correcting that assumption, it’s not completely accurate.

Though I am reluctant to admit it, Microsoft is on the right path with .NET. Microsoft is only the enemy insofar as they attempt to prevent interoperability, and the New Microsoft seems to be coming to the realization that they are going to have to do business in a world in which they produce only one of many popular computing environments, not the homogeneous landscape they dominate today. Between the various distributions of Linux and Apple’s Mac OS X, competition is on the rise. The iPod Halo Effect is one oft-quoted piece of evidence of this fact.

In the near future, the Mono Project’s open source .NET runtime will have full WinForms support, and Microsoft is “friendly,” according to this rather ancient post and this article by Miguel de Icaza. I’m optimistic about running Office, Money, and other proprietary Microsoft products natively in Linux soon (not Crossover– emulation is merely a stop-gap, and please don’t flame me about how it’s Not An Emulator). I’ll even pay for them! I just want to have the choice of an operating system other than Windows (as ubu once so cleverly pointed out, “the operating system named for a GUI feature”).

I’m confident that some day I’ll be able to run our applications on Mono, but even then I will likely be using Visual Studio .NET, because it’s damn good. I love Vim, but man you should see some of the things vs.net can do. Maybe I’ll find a nice way to use vi keybindings, find and replace, macros, and “.”, or maybe I’ll just get used to the idea of leaving the home row more often.

I haven’t been on board with any Microsoft “initiatives” in the past, oh, six years. In retrospect, the only reason I favored Microsoft back then was an ignorance of alternatives. But I’m on board with .NET.

Do you remember Sun’s hype about Java back in the day (”compile once, run anywhere”)? Do you also remember what a flop that turned out to be? Well, .NET is basically Java Done Right. Let’s face it. If Microsoft is on board with this, it’s going to be popular. That much is inevitable. Microsoft’s enthusiasm about having “other implementations of .NET” is a sign that they’re finally “getting it.” You do the math, folks. At the risk of sounding like a bona fide Microsoft evangelist, .NET will have an impact on the world of technology that is greater than Java’s. Look at the numbers: according to indeed.com, there are 57,618 java job postings and 57,207 .NET job postings. I’d say that’s an impact. Just wait until all of that software “runs anywhere” and supports your favorite programming language.

Well, wish me luck on my new venture, I’m sure I’ll be blogging about it in the near future, so stay tuned.