February Accomplishments

My coworkers have both posted their accomplishments for the month of Febtober, so I'll join the cool kids and try to impress the boss.

I got hired at the beginning of the month, and spent my first few weeks getting settled in and finishing up work on Carrier and Bryant, both of which have now gone live. I started work on these while I was contracting, before I was hired into the programming department, but I'm still proud of the work that I did. Together with several others, I put a lot of time into the production of these websites, and I can safely say that I've touched every single one of the 600+ pages between the two sites. The sites works well in modern browsers, and comes as close to validating as a site this size ever does. The code is modern and clean, and that has saved us untold hours of work when the inevitable change requests start coming through.

I've also been working on the SelecTrucks project, and the first site, for Memphis, has already gone live. This was my first experience working with DNN, and while I'm frustrated with some of the ugly code it puts out, and the speed of the admin section at times, I admit that I'm overall impressed with the way it's going to let us develop this large group of sites very quickly. Plus, Memphis has one of the best and most unique web designs I've ever seen. It was a true joy to work with.

In the last couple weeks, I've been doing lots of tweaks and edits to existing sites, as well as a one-off project that had me duplicate an existing site design using standards and CSS for a mini-site (not sure if I can say the client here, so I'll leave that a bit vague). I've also started work on the next SelecTrucks site, and this is the first one that I've been involved in the initial setup of the DNN back-end. It has been frustratingly slow going, as DNN can be incredibly complicated at times, but I do feel that I'm slowly learning how it ticks, and I think that my speed will increase with each one of these sites. I'm learning how the work I'm putting in now, while slow, will serve as the groundwork for future sites, which will save time in the long run.

As far as training and networking, there hasn't been much time, but I've fit a few in. I watched that ASP.NET training video that I already mentioned, and also attended a Microsoft lunch seminar with Andrew and Kelly about Sharepoint and Office 12 (which I'll be writing about in a future post). And last night I went with a bunch of fellow Pop-Art-ers (PopArtists? PotArt-eers?) to Oregon Business Magazine's Top 100 Businesses to Work for in Oregon 2006 dinner, and found out that we're ranked number 24!