A Month and Half in the DogHouse

by Evan

Hi, my name is Evan, and this is my first entry for The Hind Leg. You probably won’t have spoken to me yet, or even heard of me. I am, as they say, “the new guy”. At the beginning of July I was offered a position here as a developer. Since then, time has flown by. I feel like I’ve been exposed to more information, techniques and experiences than I ever could have in an academic environment. I just thought I’d share some of these experiences of the last few weeks.
 
Drupal. As you probably know, we’re big fans of the CMS here. With the odd exception, every day we’re jumping in, poking around and tinkering with it. Given my limited experience with Drupal before kicking off here, I’ve come to appreciate and admire it. Make no mistake, Drupal is a complex, powerful beast and can also be quite daunting at first glance. But that in itself is what is so cool about it, there’s next to nothing that you can’t do with Drupal. Coming from a Wordpress background, Drupal is simply amazing in that regard. Things that might take me days to do with Wordpress can be accomplished in hours or even minutes in Drupal. I’m thoroughly looking forward to expanding my Drupal expertise and showing the other guys a thing or two.
 
Coffee. There’s a big difference between a flat white and a skinny flat white. Also between a half sugar, one sugar and, God forbid, two sugars. It’s also the DogHouse fuel of choice.
 
Magento. Probably the only package I’ve encountered so far in my time here that can rival Drupal in terms of complexity, Magento has been a major part of my foray in to E-commerce here at DogHouse. E-commerce is a complex problem that requires a solution with a certain level of finesse, a level that is met by Magento and I’m excited to be stepping in to the deepend. 
 
Small business. I think this is probably my favourite part of DogHouse. We’re not some faceless corporation. We don’t believe in partitions. Management is a fairly loose concept. An office meeting generally consists of us swivelling our chairs around and discussing whatever we have to. Micro-managing is a foreign concept; we all just get on with what needs to be done. We’re big on communication with our clients; we listen, empathise and give constructive feedback – we are a small business that works for you, and I believe that gives us an edge.
 
The deep end. Just when I think I’m getting comfortable, my world will be flipped upside-down again. As I mentioned, we’re a small company and we’re involved in a big industry. Because of this, we’re exposed to fields that we wouldn’t normally be comfortable with nor had experience in. That will never stop us, however. In the past month and a half I’d say I’ve been a developer, a designer, a systems administrator, a database administrator, a tester, a documenter and a project coordinator. It’s this variety of work that makes us better at what we do, not to mention learning new skills keeps the job interesting!
 
I’ll sign this post off now. Hopefully we’ll get to chat about your next project soon!