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So Renata had to go in for surgery last week.  Being the good boyfriend that I am, I took the week off to stay home to take care of her.

She recovered really fast, and so we had a nice relaxing week together.  She’s been pretty tired and sleeping has been a hassle for her, so she gets in one to two hour naps every now and then.

This gave me a lot of nice free time to spend on some things I’ve left on the back-burner lately.  I’ve been putting off learning Drupal for awhile now, as I’ve been so busy.  And to be honest, it’s hard to go code some more after coding all day at work.

Learning more about Drupal has given me a new perspective on my own career that I hadn’t really thought of.  I know a lot of people telecommute for work.  But the Drupal community has a lot of job posting that are in geographically disparate places.  So this really puts an emphasis on telecommuting.  What’s nice though, is that these jobs will pay much higher than jobs that I can find here, simply for the fact that the cost of living is a lot different.

I saw a job posting that pays between $60k - $90k for a entry level PHP/Drupal developer in New York.  A $90k job in New York is supposedly equivalent to a job that pays only $40k or so here in Ottawa.  Yet, telecommuting will give the perks of a really high salary minus the high cost of living that comes with living in a place like New York.

Anyways, aside from this insight, I’m finding Drupal to be a really well designed framework.  Drupal is an open-source content management system, that allows you to create powerful web pages really quickly.  Unlike a lot of other CMS’s, it does take a little bit of time to get things to work the way you want them too, but investment seems to be well worth it.   As an example, with Drupal, you could quickly create something similar to a basic version of Facebook.  There are a lot of new social networking niche sites popping up that use Drupal.

I’ve also returned to do a few more problems on ProjectEuler.  For you developers out there, definitely check out ProjectEuler.net.  ProjectEuler is a site that contains 150 or so computer-science problems.  The problems are straightforward, but require a bit of math, critical thinking, and programming to solve.

What’s nice is that as you solve problems on the site, it unlocks forums that discuss solutions to problems that you solve.  A lot of people on the site are brilliant and provide ways of solving things that I could never come up with.

After graduating from University I have found that I’m using less of the solid Computer Science skills (more of the math and algorithmic related skills) and using more of “software engineering” skills.  Not that one is less than another, but those math and problem solving skills do come in handy, and they keep skill sets sharp.  Anyways, all the really interesting skills are in the computer science domain anyhow.

So, for a vacation I found myself at home relaxing, spending time with Renata, and coding up things out of my own interest.  It wasn’t a vacation that I wouldn’t take often, but it was quite nice.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.