Thirty.
About three weeks ago, I turned 30. It was a hard milestone for me, I had hoped to achieve more in my life than I have.
It arrived quickly, suspiciously quickly. I wasn't entirely convinced that 3 decades had indeed passed since I was born... But alas, it was correct and I enjoyed a few beers and some bloody red meat with friends and family at my house. The way everybody should see in 30.
I am my own biggest critic. I give myself a hard time for everything, I seriously cannot be happy with myself, so when I realised that I had made a lot of plans that I had wanted to have done by this age and that none of them had been accomplished, I got really down on myself. I wont go into what they are, mainly because they'll seem silly and people will say "but what about all these other things you've done .... " and its not for other people to comment on.
A few other things struck me when I turned 30...
- Its been 11 1/2 years since I have seen my mum. She passed in 1998 after battling cancer for 12 years.
- Its been 12 years since I had the accident. I lost three fingers on my right hand and spent a lot of time in hospital having a lot of different procedures that still make me feel like a scar-covered freak.
- Its been 13 years since I met my beautiful wife and the backbone of my life. Yes, I was 17, we were only together 8 months before my accident and 13 months before my mum died. She is my everything (well, her and Abbey.)
- Its been 19 years since my parents split. This is a big one, I couldn't believe it had been that long.
While I may occasionally be guilty of wallowing in my own misfortune while having a glass of wine and listening to nostalgia provoking music, I am not one to want or tolerate peoples pity of me. Others in the world are more deserving of that and I don't write posts like this in an attempt to go 'fishing' for comments. I write them because I feel better when I put my feelings into words.
I dont feel thirty. I sometimes hear my voice and think I sound like a 13 year old. I don't feel like I should be old enough for a mortgage, children, married life.... Its a hard feeling to describe. I'm not saying 30 is old, I'm saying I don't feel 30... Or old... whatever.
I'm a seriously lucky guy, I have a beautiful healthy family, I live in a great city within an even greater country. I am the ultimate optimist, I hate negativity, the glass is *always* half full and I sometimes fear I haven't entirely grasped the situation when I am positively moving forward while others seem to be going mad in their stress.
I created an email address for Abbey the other day so I can email her my thoughts and feelings (yes, I know she is 2) and I will hand over the login details for her when she is 16. I tried to keep a book for her, but I never had it on me when I had something to add into it. I also started a new site just for her... AbbeySays.com - somewhere for me to log her amazing adventure through speech.
Buenos Noches friends, I hope you'll be here when I post about my 40th.
8 weeks. Eight-Freaking-Weeks!
8 weeks ago I embarked on a journey that would change my life. Little did I know at the time just how much this journey would affect me physically, emotionally and psycologically.
Lets go back a further 2 weeks. I started a new job as Senior Developer for OMG. We have a 'legacy' codebase for our CMS (Content Management System) which works, but needs some performance improvements. I have been given the task of fixing up this codebase. One of the areas that requires a lot of enhancing is our search engine, but its not quite as simple as writing a little query in SQL such as 'SELECT blah FROM table WHERE name LIKE "%search term%"'... Oh no, its not quite that easy.
Think 31,000 domain names, each with an unknown number of categories, each having either category niche (auto's for example) or a specific location match (Sydney, for example). Then, throw in almost 2,000,000 listings to appear on these sites in an ordering specific to their account type and account data and make sure that Tasmanian Lawyers do not appear on our Perth Plumbers site...
Enter an enthusastic new employee wanting to make his mark and you have an 8 week journey through 19 hour days, crashed servers, day-long data rebuilds and many more exciting activities.
We decided to build the search engine in Sphinx which is a full text replacement for MySQL, I wont go into the details of how we did this, but I will say that the code and indexes have been rewritten about 6 or 7 times inclusive. I have worked on this, day in and day out for 8 weeks. That is the longest time I have ever spent on a single component and a few times I have been curious about whether my boss thought he'd made an incorrect decision hiring me. More of my hair is grey now than it was 8 weeks ago and my wife is questioning my commitment to our marriage after displaying willingness to stay up and work rather than come to bed.
Last night, we pushed the latest changes to a staging server and replayed Apache logs (from a period when traffic was destroying our servers) to test performance... and it passed. To say I am happy is an under statement, we went into this to increase performance and to remove as much as we can from MySQL (for various reasons) and a few times there I was unsure whether we had just wasted our time, including one time when I made the suggestion that we use a different Full Text Indexer (such as Xapian.) But today, the finish line can be sensed, a term search across 1,900,000 rows is taking 0.07 seconds which is awesome, which only one or two queries in MySQL.
This is why I am in development, this sense of satisfaction you get when, after weeks of nutting something out, it works... and works well. Hopefully I'll still have a job now when my probation period is up next month.
I will be making a post about my findings with Sphinx and how to make it work well when you have multiple criteria to search within on Fliquid Studios in the coming weeks (once I am absolutely sure that this is working ok.)
