Blog + Résumé = Blogumé!

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is from lifehack.org. Every so often I'll see a decent productivity hack, like this lifehack article, so today I'll give it a whirl and blog about some of the awesome work I've done this week for my employer.

Here are two biggies for this week:

1. I uncovered the source of a class of errors in our French localization code. This was complicated by the fact that the core logic of our exam code was written in Mason, which is essentially Perl embedded in HTML. Mason is a decent templating language, but it's hard to debug. Once the source of the problem was understood, the project lead (thanks SB!) spec'ed it out, and it took about an afternoon to code up unit tests, the code proper, and documentation to match. The original code desperately needed refactoring, documentation, and additional unit tests anyhow, so this is a double win.
   
2. I had a last-minute product release dropped on my desk Thursday afternoon. Because I was able to reuse some background work I'd invested into two previous releases, I was able to build a high-quality release using RPM in the space of about an hour. The actual release process ended up taking about ten minutes, which makes this our fastest release ever, in terms of both prep time and production server downtime. At one point my manager had a goal of streamlining our release process to take fewer than four hours, so I feel pretty good about this.

That's all for this week. More later as time permits.