August, 1, 2024 archives

An adjustment to my résumé that I made a while ago was to split out the software engineering work I did for our store into a position at Imperial Dog, Inc. which is the name of the corporation that did business as Raw Materials Art Supplies and served as the production company behind some of Celia’s short films.

I used the title of “Staff Software Engineer” as a sort of anchor to the level that I see myself at, but in hindsight that may have been too aggressive when applying to lower-titled roles like “Senior Software Engineer.” So I’ve updated it to “Consulting Software Engineer” which feels sort of vague and non-leveled and hopefully not similarly off-putting.

I am progressing along the interview path for a few positions now, so I have some hope that this drought will end soon and I can escape this particular purgatory.

I have slowed down on applying to jobs as I hold out hope for the current prospects, and I have been getting more involved with the PHP project again in some of the same ways that I was involved 20+ years ago.

I tackled a couple of projects in the documentation, including filling in some of the missing history of the project, removing some ancient documentation for XForms (a technology that never really got traction), and adding background and supporting material about the hash functions. A couple of these were picked up from outstanding issues in the repository, or inspired by conversations on the internals mailing list about possible upcoming deprecations.

I am also trying to dive in on the infrastructure and governance sides, which is slower going. I have mostly documented who the members of the PHP organization on GitHub are. I have access again to the machine where the mailing lists run, so I have been working on getting its configuration properly handled within the big ball of code that the team uses to manage the project infrastructure, and trying to help clean that stuff up and make sure more of the setup is known and documented. The team supporting all of this infrastructure had dwindled over the years but things have been kind of chugging along.

One way to sum up what I am trying to do by getting involved in the PHP community again is to leverage my privilege (from past participation and the usual privilege I carry) to clean up some of the on-ramps for new people to get involved. It moves more slowly than I would like at times, but I am glad to have this time now to apply pressure to the problems that I see. Seeing how the Python community has organized themselves is an inspiration.