fm6's Journal: A Job, at Last

After 15 months of unemployment, I finally got a writing contract. At Adobe no less. Not a lot of money (in fact, my entire pay will certainly be consumed by some endodontal work I need), but darn, I was sick of not working. And it's plain old nitpicky API writing, which I dearly love to do.

I got this job partially because of my experience with API work at Borland, but mainly (I think) because I had some heavy experience with JavaDoc, which experience translates nicely to working with Doxygen. Doxygen is supposed to be a language agnostic answer to JavaDoc, but in practice it's mainly used for C++. To support other languages, you need to writer a parser. (JavaDoc uses the Introspection API to pull signatures out of Java class files, so it doesn't need to do any real parsing.)

I actually have some technical issues with Doxygen. It generates some very weird HTML. And the way it generates XML (assembling all the markup strings by hand, instead of using a standard API, such as SAX) makes me very nervous. But Doxygen's markup language is 10 times more powerful than JavaDoc. And JavaDoc doesn't even do XML. Wouldn't be very hard to do. Except certain people with the Java Division happen to be painfully XMLphobic. Which is why ... (bites tongue until it bleeds).

Mazal tov!

[NaveWeiss]

Good that you've found a job. Maybe now can you tell me why you quit Borland?
Bummer that you need teeth treatment though. Scary!! :-0

You're missing a closing parenthesis somewhere in your last paragraph, btw.

Re:Mazal tov!

[fm6]

Missing parenthesis, missing teeth, it's all the same.

I was just at another job interview, where the pubs manager knew about Borland, even knew about Delphi, but was quite suprised to hear that people were still buying the product. In point of fact, Delphi is just not the best product, it's the only product for certain kinds of development. That's Borland in a nutshell -- everybody knows about them and their products, but everybody assumes that Borland is out of business, or about to become so (though it'

Re:Mazal tov!

[NaveWeiss]

Woha, it's been a long time since I've ever seen a commnet so long. It was an interesting read, thank you. :)

(And in an unrelated subject) Do you speak Hebrew?
Oh, and your Wiki isn't working. I wanted to write some crap in it. :)

Re:Mazal tov!

[fm6]

I studied Hebrew for my Bar Mitzvah, which occurred a very long time ago (no, I will not be more specific). Haven't looked at it since. My ability to learn or retain languages (non-English human languages, anyway) is pathetic.

I know the TWiki is broken. Haven't had a chance to work on it in a couple weeks. Besides, aren't you supposed to have a few broken links on a personal web site? Everybody else does!

Congratulations!

[The Cydonian]

Just to let you know, your resume, impressive as it is, has one of the coolest layouts I've ever seen. So much so that it had, to a fair extent, it had even influenced my resume as well. And this a resume that delivered my current job as a software engineer in one of the not-so-bigshot companies here. ;-)

So, a warm thank you from here, and congratulations on your new job. :-)

Re:Congratulations!

[fm6]

Good lord! I never thought of myself as a graphic designer. Indeed I have some minor neurological impairments that kind of screw up my ability to think visually.

When I put together that online resume, I was working through Molly Holzchlag's [molly.com] book, Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge [amazon.com]. I didn't copy any of her designs (she's a great web designer, a pretty good technologist, but a painfully disorganized writer), but perhaps some of her philosophy rubbed off on me. I was looking more to show that I kne