I went in to About.com's new digs today, on 17th street in Chelsea. I must say, it feels good to be back. I worked in the neighborhood for a couple years a few years back, first for BitFlip and then for Vanguard Media. The air is sweeter, the food is worlds better, and if I ever need any gay porn I should be all set. The waiter at my favorite restaurant, Edo, was so happy to have me back...
The office itself is drab but workable. I've got a seat with a view and my junk has plenty of room to fester. I need to bring in a coffee machine since they relocated my coffee-machine-having friend two floors down. Let's just say the free coffee comes out of the same nozel as hot cocoa and something called "mochachinno" and leave it at that.
I got some good design work done today. I've been trying out a consciously use-case driven approach and I think it's really working well. I wrote out a list of all the different jobs that people will do with the system. Then went through each one considering how it fits into my plans. This pointed out some useful questions and some possible optimizations that I'll use in the design.
I also played some with MySQL, trying to get back into the groove with it. I've been using PostgreSQL for a year and a half now and I'm really looking forward to getting back to MySQL. I've found working with PostgreSQL to be consistently frusterating. It certainly has gotten better with time, but even the high variability between versions is a problem. Really, the one thing PostgreSQL has going for it is a huge variety of features (sub-selects, functions, constraints, triggers, etc) that MySQL lacks. Since I grew up writing apps with MySQL I'm pretty sure I'll be ok without them. Most of the time they seem to cause as many problems as they solve (*ahem*, cascading deletes), particularly when it turns out they're only half-implemented (*ahem*, ALTER TABLE).
-sam
ALTER TABLE is dramatically improved in the soon-to-be-released PostgreSQL 7.3.
--David
