My new job at CirrusMio has been going great these past couple of months. I got to go to RubyConf 2012 in Denver, which was awesome. I had never been to RubyConf before, and it was great to go to a conference so relevant to what I do and enjoy. I especially enjoyed Refactoring from Good to Great and Jim Weirich’s keynote.

I recently changed jobs, going from a web developer position to programming. I had been at a consulting company where I did a lot of web design with a bit of WordPress and Drupal customization. Now I’m at a local Ruby on Rails company as a programmer, and I’m super happy to be back in Rails. I hadn’t used Rails regularly since an intern position I had years ago, back when Rails was on maybe at version 1. I forgot how awesome a language Ruby is, too; I hadn’t used Ruby since I finished my Master’s project last year. Now I get to use Capybara, CoffeeScript, Sunspot, SASS, Arel, and experience all the new stuff Rails 3 has to offer.

I’m back from my week and a half in Jersey, helping with requirements gathering for a new project at work. We were originally supposed to have to go back next week for a couple of days, but our project manager was able to push through all the functionality we needed to cover, and he’s satisfied we got what we needed. I’m glad, because I was not looking forward to more indirect flights and getting up at 6 every morning. Our flight home last night involved a layover in Atlanta, which is the silliest thing when traveling from NJ to KY, but there are just no direct flights from Philly to Lexington.

I’m going to New Jersey for the first time for work, and I’ll be up there about two and a half weeks. I was asked last week if I’d come along to help with the requirements gathering process for a new project, and I agreed, though I may freeze my tail off. There’s a lot of flying involved because we’ll be coming back to Lexington over the weekends, and we’ll be flying out of Cincinnati instead of Lexington. I’m borrowing a huge suitcase from a coworker since my one medium-sized suitcase won’t cut it for a week-long stay–you can tell I don’t travel much. I doubt I’ll have much time for sight-seeing since we’re doing eight-hour work days, but we’ll probably get to try some good Jersey food: we’ll do lunches with the client and I’ll get dinner with my coworkers.

Today was my last day at HP, the end of a two-year internship. Starting Thursday, I’ll be working at a local company on their Java/open source team, and I think my first project will deal with PHP. I’m excited to start a new job, and am looking forward to doing something different on a daily basis than what I was doing at HP. Leaving HP wasn’t my original goal, and I started back in February trying to get a regular-employee position there, but it just never happened. They were in a hiring freeze and despite my manager’s efforts, they never got me an offer letter.

Recently at work, the web admin for the computer science department came into our lab and told us that my employer’s site was broken. The admin had need to make all .php files not act as PHP scripts, and instead, all files with the extension .sphp would now run as PHP scripts. Since my employer’s site was built using PHP, that meant all of its pages were showing the source code instead of actually executing. I had to whip up a quick Ruby script in order to: