I was
reading an article today on
outspokenmedia.com that was written back in April of 2009 and
I was pretty impressed with it. I too feel that not only are people using the recession as an excuse for not trying, but also that employers are using it as an excuse to get rid of employees without having anyone put up a fight. "I'm sorry Bob, in this economy we have all had to make cutbacks, as a result we are going to give you 10 minutes to get your stuff together and say goodbye to the job you have had for 5 years." To which Bob replies "I can totally understand, at least you are going to give me my Christmas Bonus before I leave right?" hahaha. Poor little developer, you'd be cute if we weren't embarrassed to look you in the eye.
Lisa Barone goes through a few points that employees and especially contractors should be doing in order to not only stay afloat, but to excel during these crazy times.
I feel that I am performing the majority of items that Lisa suggests we do: Learn something new, Work harder than everyone else, Do the leg work, Take risks, and Shut up. I am always learning and I love it so this is not a problem for me. Even now that I am not on a full-time gig I still sit in front of my computer for a minimum of 8 hours a day. Not 8 hours a day watching YouTube, but spent coding. I have written
a framework from the ground up using PHP5.3 features such as namespaces, closures/lambdas, __callStatic, and late static binding. I use these features to build next level framework components such as Dependency Injection, Annotations and a Unit of Work maintained ORM layer. A little over 7,000 lines of code in a couple of weeks. I have also tried out what the development work cycle is like with
Zend Studio 7.1 and
Zend Server CE. I also used those tools to build a brand new
Zend Framework application using a modular layout and integrating
Doctrine as the ORM layer. Finally I have started to work with
GWT and have discovered that it can actually be really fun to work with. There are a few other items that I have been researching and playing with, but long story short,
I have used my free time to the max increasing my skill set.
The one thing that I am still sucking at is surrounding myself with fighters.
It's hard to surround yourself with anyone when you work from home. I feel that I need to start being more involved in the PHP community and so I have been trying to find a PHP user group in Toronto that I could attend and perhaps speak at. So far, no luck. If any of you know of a group in the GTA please feel free to tell me about it in the comments!
