So a bunch of time has passed. We develop thicker skin or we back away and gawk. The first is the preferred method of handling the future.

I got a new job. It’s nothing spectacular, but I like the people. The work is meandering and for the most part uninteresting–lots of tracking down and fixing bugs written into a codebase that was created back when OOP was in its infancy in PHP. I don’t get to use much creativity in handling issues, and the vast majority of my job description is maintaining legacy code, not creating new solutions. There are pages that query the database upwards of 30 times each page load. The amount of time required to fix issues like that (not show-stoppers, not bugs) is insurmountably larger than the potential return on that time investment.

It’s not bad code. It’s just old. It reminds me a great deal of the kind of code I wrote in the late ’90s: A long riddle of functions named like save(), _save() and __save(). Not awful, but awfully difficult to parse when you’re used to the cleanliness of PHP5.

The company works directly for pharmaceutical companies. All the projects are internal and only used by the people dealing directly with aforementioned pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma doesn’t like outsides looking at their dirty laundry, so I’ll probably never link to anything I’ve ever done. It’s like a giant vertical market, one that is riddled with cash, and is seemingly inexhaustible in its desire to plumb the depths of humanity’s perceived need to “cure” restless leg syndrome.

I’m smiling a little more these days, if only because I can pay my rent on time.