Code || Theory

My regular blog is certainly not a secret, but some people find it too personal (or vulgar) to read on a regular basis. Plus, most of my friends probably don't want to see code samples or Big O analysis of algorithms, so it makes to spin off a slice of my nerdity.

I'm attending a web development summit at Microsoft in Seattle next week, and they asked for a bio to share.

Here's what I told them:

Hello, I'm Jesse Mullan, a developer from the Gallery open source
project. I work for the marketing department of the University of
Minnesota Student Unions and Activities office as a web developer. I
get paid to spend my days editing php in emacs and occasionally making
zombie videos to promote our retail services.

http://www.sua.umn.edu/luuuuuuuuuunch

I almost sent them the following, but chickened out.

I've been hacking on PHP since 1999 or so when I hooked up a spare box to my then new DSL service. At that point I think that I was still using shell scripts to wrap my status updates in html and give me some sort of log of what I had changed on my website. I parlayed that savvy into a glamorous "htmlsetting" job at a company whose initials were shared with a certain gastrointestinal disorder (they have since added a couple of words to their name). After the tech bubble burst and television advertising hit a major slump, I found myself temping at a major mortgage company running reports on layoffs in Access and pasting the results into Excel to email to various management types. To avoid the soul crushing monotony and horror of that job, I automated the process using VBA while rewriting any many of the queries into native MSSQL. Through my secretive efforts, I transformed the monthly reports from a nightmarish four day process of weeping blood into a mere four hours of distracted web surfing. However, that year or so of work convinced me to return to school in 2004.

I've been involved in the Gallery project since 2001, when I mostly provided entertainment for the project leader, Bharat. At some point I wrote a handful of nice enhancements to the version 1 product and was invited to officially join the team. I then wrote the migration module to import version one data into version two, which meant unserializing the data from the first product and . Additionally I acted as a sounding board for ideas and as a generator for crazy new ideas like a UTF-8 mandate. Last summer I officially declared myself on sabbatical from Gallery to focus on grinding out my undergraduate degree.

I finished the computer science parts of my degree last spring right as my job created a position to hire me on full time, so now I'm just mired in the liberal arts requirements. My favorite classes were the graduate level algorithms and complexity theory courses. When I can sneak in CS classes again, I'm looking forward to the compilers and programming language theory classes. In the mean time, I have senioritis like you wouldn't believe.

I'm currently a full time web developer for the University of Minnesota's Student Unions and Activities. My job is to convert ancient cowboy pasta code into elegant and maintainable castles of wonder and beauty. I wrote a custom image and data management application for the music club in my building and I have been so deep in our custom calendaring application that the mole people who live inside made me their king. In the process I have gotten the chance to play with natural language processing, scratch built frameworks, elaborate error handling, and a bunch of other slices of computer science. I try to treat my PHP work seriously, despite the lack of respect that it gets in these academic surroundings.

I also wanted to say just this:

I made a "soup of the day" tool for a client, and they stopped serving soup a month later.