Much Ado About Nothing

It's been an awkward and frustrating couple of weeks lately. Not everything is going quite as we had planned it I suppose you could say. The Wildlife Rehab site is on a bit of a hiatus as we try to work out where we're going to place some new content, and where that content is going to come from. Not to mention a laundry list of tweaks and changes that'll need to be taken care of at some point, but there's a few items blocking progress on that list. Hopefully that'll all come together soon, but it's also not a major rush of any sort either.

Work lately has been a bit on the ho-hum side of things. I've mainly just been doing odds and ends style work on legacy applications and other maintenance style work. I have had a couple of really simplistic and short Django applications to write, but nothing major or thrilling. Nothing exceptional worth really talking about. Oddly, I'm supposed to blog something for Imaginary Landscape, but considering how little I've had to do in terms of actual Python/Django work, I have no idea what to blog about. Hell, I barely know what to put on this blog most of the time. On the upside I am going to PyCon next week, so after I get back from that I'll hopefully have something to blog for them. We'll see I suppose.

Currently though, my main focus at work is developing an iPhone application. I have some pretty mixed feelings over the whole situation. First off, it's a monumental task in my eyes, and I'm not sure that management totally gets that. I'm getting some of my first glimpses ever at Objective C, and I've been pretty clear that I have to learn a new language, and a new development environment. I've played with it a bit thus far, and even though I have C/C++/C# experience to some degree, Objective C just feels so incredibly foreign to me. Obviously, it doesn't help that thus far I've been trying to learn strictly via Apple documentation and online tutorials while hopping between other small issues as well. I know it's something I can do, that's not the question, it's more how long it's going to take. I don't have a personal vested interest in making an iPhone application, it's not something I want to slap on my resume some day really. Thus, I'm not cramming at home in my off time to learn more. I like Python, so in my off time I write my code in Python.

Secondly, I tend to think that making an iPhone web application makes a lot more sense in a lot of ways. Obviously, it's *free* to do so, which is a big plus. It also doesn't require anyone to learn Objective C. You don't have the risk of spending weeks/months of development time, just for Apple to potentially decline your application. We could build it using tools we're familiar with, in a much shorter amount of time. Finally, should anything ever happen to me, they wouldn't have to find someone that knows PHP, Python, bash, AND Objective C. Those people exist, but they're likely to be expensive.

Finally, I see so much else we could be doing to improve our current infrastructure including servers, documentation, issue tracking/management, and quality assurance with the free time we're spending on this random iPhone project. I guess I look at and think that if we improved some various aspects of our infrastructure that down the road we'd have even more time to spend on projects such as this, and be able to do it with less distractions. They have a lot of good things going here, and it'd be nice to bring some legacy items we use up to date.

In the end, the iPhone stuff isn't that big of a deal. I'll do it, and I'll try to enjoy it I suppose. It seems a bit silly to me overall, but that's just how it goes sometimes. I just wish the project we were working on was somewhat more entertaining. If it nets the company a few more customers that's a good thing I suppose. Of course that'd mean I'd have to write more iPhone applications :).

Other than that, not much going on lately. I'll be sure to update with more information after I get back from PyCon, which I am pretty excited about. Just wish it'd hurry up and get here.

Furry Little Critters

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you've probably heard me talking about my recent side project. It's a work in progress for a non-profit company outside of St. Louis, MO that helps save wild animals that are commonly found in Missouri. They rescue anything from squirrels to skunks, from cute to terrifying. My sister's been involved with them for awhile, and found that they recently needed a more efficient manner of processing volunteers. Previously they had a PDF that could be downloaded, or you could call in and offer to volunteer. This obviously required humans to take a lot of time just handling and processing new volunteers. That translates to time volunteers can't spend on event planning, fund raising, and most importantly, caring for animals.

Now they have a handy Django based application, that's admittedly very, very basic. Ultimately, it's just a form that saves information to the database, with the standard Django administrative application to allow admins to view their volunteers, and manage them. Naturally when a form is submitted, an email goes out to the staff alerting them of their new applicant containing the information that they submitted. Now they have the application at a glance, and can decide if they'd like to give this person a call, and if they meet their volunteer requirements or not. Initial feedback I've had so far seems to point to this being rather helpful thus far, as they deal with an influx of volunteers thanks to a recent TV spot, and other local news sources. Spring time equals mating season for many animals, and just like humans, mating always lead to at least *some* bad fortune.  As a result, spring is when they often need the most help.

As I was working on the site and dealing with their current host (who to my surprise was quite knowledgeable and helpful for being your standard "cheap" host); I offered to rebuild and redesign the entire site. I didn't really have any side projects at the time as outside and personal interest in DjTracker waned, so I figured it'd be a fun project and who knows, maybe it'd save a couple of critters. I'm fairly certain I couldn't deal with the stuff they deal with in caring for animals, so I figure this is about as close as I'm getting to actually nursing an animal back to health.  At this point the site is mostly done bringing us to what I consider the most awkward part of web development.

As we sit now the site is fully functionally CMS-lite system. I'm just using flat pages for the majority of the content, a simple blog build out for the news, django-photologue for galleries, and few other lightweight applications for odds and ends (gluing everything together, events, visitors, etc). The design and layout are pretty much set as well. Now where the awkwardness comes in is that you now have the child of two different people. On one side I put in a lot of effort to make this site, copy content over, and trying to make everything presentable. On the other side, this is a non-profit company's "customer" facing website that will always represent them. It creates this weird situation where I don't want to insult any of their ideas of what should change and how their site should be presented, and they don't want to insult any of the work I've put forth thus far.

It's no different than what I deal with at work really, except maybe the people behind this side project know me to some degree, and respect me which maybe just exacerbates the problem. It's actually not a problem as of yet, but from working for other customers I know how easily it can get a bit tense.  Honestly, I just hope they like it, and that it makes their lives a bit easier. Ultimately, I think those goals will be accomplished, so I'm pretty optimistic about the situation.