I’ve been telling friends and family that we are leaving the east coast in a few months. They typically ask the same questions:

1. Where are you going? Fort Carson in Colorado Springs
2. When are you leaving? We have to be there on May 20th
3. How long are you going to be gone? At least three years
4. Are you coming back? We have no idea
5. What are you gonna do for a job? I have no idea

That last question has been on my mind as of late. I really have no idea what’s going to happen with my job. I’ve got a couple of scenarios in my head, and I’m trying to plan ahead for each of them. Job searches in the Colorado Springs area show that there are plenty of tech jobs out there, but they are all .NET and Java. All of them. Open source jobs are either non-existent or not advertised.

I’ve spent the past few years concentrating on the open source side of web development; specifically PHP. In the past year I spent time dabbling in VBScript with Classic ASP Classic and C# with ASP.NET. I’ve had very little exposure to Java, but the little I have had was enough to know it isn’t for me. I don’t like these languages and technologies. Worse yet, my ability to use them is pretty poor. Now I’m faced with nothing but these as possible future job opportunities, and frankly that scares the hell out of me.

It is probably too early to be concerning myself with this, but I can’t help it. With all the other things involved with this move, adding this to the list will only make it harder. To allay my fears a bit, I will spend time learning C# and perhaps Java (*shudder*). If I feel confident in my ability to pick up those languages and their related technologies, I won’t worry myself sick.

Any advice is appreciated.

Like many full-time web developers, when I am not coding at work I am coding at home. Those projects are usually favors for friends or family who want to post photos or some other simple thing. The project I am going to describe doesn’t fall into that category.

Sometime in the mid 90s I put together my fraternity’s first site on Geocities. Ever since then, I have been attached to this site in one way or another. Sometimes I was the sole editor and developer, other times I just approved new users, and still others I just dealt with really light administrative work like setting up new email addresses.

The fraternity’s current leadership has decided that the site needs to be fully revamped from the ground up. It needs to communicate to the students on campus as well as keep the brothers (both undergraduate and alumni) in touch with each other. Their plans are ambitious, and they’ve asked me to helm the development of this site.

As I work through this project, I thought it might be interesting to share my experiences here.

So far, I have a very rough outline of the requirements. The site will be divided into three major sections:

1. Frontend - the part of the site that all visitors will see. This would include content like a guestbook, photo gallery, and mission statement.
2. Forum - a private forum for communication between fraternity members. For years this has been the primary method of communication between brothers who moved away from the New England area, and was recently subject to an attack.
3. Backend - another private area of the site that will function much like a knowledge base. A member directory and our constitution are examples of what would be stored there. Additionally, this is were site editors will be able to post content.

Given the short amount of time between now and the beginning of the school year, it is unlikely that all three parts will be completed. Once we have specific requirements of what each section does, we’ll need to determine which absolutely must be ready by September.

I have already chosen Drupal as the CMS. I’ve played with it a bit already, and I think it’ll meet the group’s needs easily.

One of the sites I maintain in my free time got hacked. When I looked at the site after a user reported it to me, I initially smiled and said, “at least these guys had a sense of humor about it and didn’t do much damage.” But then I thought about it a bit more, and then started to dwell on it.

That hack was a punch straight to my balls, and it hurt.

I should have kept up with upgrading the software. That simple act would have stopped this from happening. But I didn’t. I used the fact that this organization doesn’t pay me for my work as an excuse to not do my job. Now this site, which they use as a communication tool, is no longer available to them. This speaks volumes to my skill, and how much more I need to grow.

I have to spend time to fix this and make it right.

To be fair to myself, I set up that site in 2000 before I knew shit about web development. I had read a few PHP articles and fancied myself a web developer. I didn’t know much of anything, let alone security. When I moved all of my sites to a new webhost, I at least had the foresight to employ a security method that we use at my job to prevent hackers from coming across extremely sensitive data (like database usernames and passwords), so the damage was pretty self-contained.