AARP Developer Persona

Posted At : January 26, 2007 5:16 PM | Posted By : Jeff Fleitz
Related Categories: Personal
Geez, am I feeling like a senior citizen today! I have been reading all these CF developer personas today, and except for Sean Corfield, every one I have read is a thirty-something. Time for a tail-end baby boomer to get involved.  So, I am gonna go on about my bad self for a second, right after I take a swig of Geritol and change my Depends.

  • 51 years old
  • Married for 24.5 years, have two daughters and two dogs, but been through the whole bird, snake, fish thing too.
  • Drive a Dodge Dakota Pickup
  • Bought current house ten years ago, in rural Maryland on about a 3 acre wooded lot. I spend a lot of time raking leaves in the off-season
  • I used to be a Mac zealot, but I eventually grew out of it, like 15 years ago :) Have Dell and Alienware laptops.
  • I watch a lot of Foreign and Indy films from Netflix.  Will watch the occasionally epic movie (Lord of the Rings), but will not go to a movie theatre.
  • I watch the evening news on 3 channels (NBC, ABC and Fox), 24, Battlestar Gallactica  (I watched the original series in real time as a college student, for all you poseurs out there ;), Family Guy, and will be getting into Lost after recently covering the first 2 seasons on DVD.
  • Into road cycling, and kayaking. Don't like snow sports.
  • Into spicy food, although my wife and one daughter have celiac disease (allergy to wheat), so we really eat healthy most of the time, with special menus. When we eat out, Thai is my favorite, along with sushi. love Mexican. My daughter has a Peruvian boyfriend who is a chef, so we get treated to that occasionally.  One daughter works at a French cafe, so we eat that too.  We love garlic and will even put it into corn flakes, if necessary.
  •  For music, I love progressive and jazz fusion, as well as classic rock. Basically anybody that can really play without relying on a ProTools setup to make them sound way better than they actually are. Groups like Yes, Rush, Toto, Los Lobotomys, Dream Theatre, Porcupine Tree, Spocks Beard, Tool, etc.
  • I go to YouTube to check out bootleg concert footage of some of the aforementioned musical groups. Don't enjoy watching people being goofy.
I probably just made all you young folks feel really good about yourselves, didn't I?

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Freed From Purgatory

Posted At : December 11, 2006 8:37 PM | Posted By : Jeff Fleitz
Related Categories: Personal, ColdFusion
In a previous post I mentioned I had started a new job with a local defense contractor after being pretty much self-employed since 1997.  I was brought on-board to lead an on-site effort supporting a high visibility Navy project after the original lead developer moved on.  Prior to being hired, I had what appeared to be a successful interview with the customer.  At least I thought he was the customer. Turns out the guy doing the interview is working for a competing contractor (just a slight conflict of interest) and acting as a proxy for the customer. Even though they approved the hire, and the money was there, they kept stalling.  We think the guy is holding out for his company to find somebody to fill the position. Meanwhile I toiled away at performing maintenance task and some data munging on a couple of seasoned Fusebox3 applications. We gave the customer a decision deadline which has now come and past. So I will not be working on the project I was hired for. Oh, very well.

The good news is that I got an interview for another high profile Navy project that is gaining momentum and will be going joint-service over the next couple years, as the U.S. Air Force, Army and Marine Corp adopt the program.  They have hired me and I start January 2.  I am really looking forward to the opportunity and feel confident I can bring something to the table.

One of the downers of working on large Government contracts like this is that they are slow to adopt new technology, due to the constraints imposed by the IT overlords.  I will get to experience all the wonders of Enterprise computing for the first time in my life. I already know that most of the tools I have grown to love will not be part of this endeavor, at least at first.  No more Eclipse/CFEclipse, they use Dreamweaver.  They are still at CFMX 6.1, and would eventually like to move to 7.02 or Scorpio, if they ever make the approved software list.

On the plus side, I have been given some side projects to do in my spare time, including building a new company intranet, so I will still get to play around with the cool stuff on my own time, however much of that there may be.

I do know that for the first time in ten years of so, I will be working on a contract that has 5 years worth of work on it. There is a lot to be said for that.

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