A busy programmer is a happy programmer

For programmers, there's nothing worse than not having much to do. We tend to start surfing the web, reading other blogs, going over your fantasy baseball draft strategy, etc. We can't stay focused on the minor trivial tasks we do have so we tend to drift away not doing much of anything.

On the other hand, when we have a ton to do we are at our best. Cranking out code in long stretches, forgetting to eat, drink, pee, etc. We don't talk to our loved ones, we don't talk to our friends and of course, we forget about our blog.

I've definitely fallen into the latter category. As the only Java developer at Comic Wonder I certainly have my hands full, but instead of complaining, I relish the challenge. I have more work than I can possibly do but I never have to be worried about being bored. I have freedom to code in my own style, I don't have to worry about reviewing someone else's work, I can deploy on my schedule, I can make database changes as I see fit, when I see fit.

So, this blog has suffered obviously. My work days are now running from about 7:30am to 6:00pm with a very short break to get some lunch to take back to my desk. And I love every minute of it.

And what's new at Comic Wonder you ask?

For starters, we're gearing up to be able to provide radio stations around the country with their own joke of the day player to put on their site, which will link in to custom station sites within Comic Wonder where they can hold their own contests, etc. Sort of a community within a community. Much of my work over the last 3 weeks has been focused on getting that part up and running.

In addition to that, we're also talking to a fairly famous company (run by a man in pajamas) about providing joke content on their website, customized to fit their theme. This gives me an excuse to peruse a web site I would normally not visit (at least during work hours). :)

Another thing I put into test yesterday was a preference setting for users that wish to filter out our spicier jokes. You will be able to set your account to only show mild, mild and medium or mild, medium and spicy jokes. That will go into production Sunday night.

And today I'll be working on what we call Joke Limbo. It's a place to look for text jokes to save from limbo, since we believe a joke isn't a joke until it's told. This should help in those times when you really want to tell a joke but can't come up with a good one. This should also go in Sunday night (assuming I finish it today or tomorrow).

Our traffic has picked up nicely. One of our jokes got put out on stumble upon (another digg like site) and we got a lot of traffic from that and it's been progressing from there. All our performance problems seem to be a thing of the past now. We've added more hardware and memory and this weekend we'll also be putting in a second web server with a load balancer, coupled with the use of a separate file server.

Speaking of performance issues, I'd like to think Retro and Dale for their suggestions (almost simultaneously) to implement memcached on the site to handle caching of frequently run queries. I believe that's helped out our performance issues greatly. When I took over you could say things were less than efficient. Kind of like an 8 cylinder car running on 3 cylinders. We're humming along smoothly now.

And now, you're joke of the day...