Thanks for the jobs, banks blow, Zapps 0.2 out, and Idiopidae 0.2 released for all to play with. Enjoy and read on…

First off, thanks to everyone who has emailed me with jobs for my people at Bear Stearns. I’ve received about 20 job offers for them so far, so I think that’s enough. That’s actually quite a large number of jobs from just my blog so I’m thinking of doing a blog post where I put these emails into a nice list for anyone else interested. Depends on if the original submitters are into that or not.

At the moment though, I think I’ve got enough job offers for them and anyone else who needs work in Ruby on Rails. Thanks again.

My Situation At Bear

I’m actually doing fine with the whole thing. It is bizarre having an entire bank blow up under my feet right after I walk in the door, but so was having hundreds or thousands of web sites use my software with nobody interested in hiring me. At least now I’m still getting paid and don’t need to worry about what I’ll do next.

So far JPMorgan hasn’t done anything drastic so I’ve stuck around waiting to see what happens. As long as they don’t fuck things up further I’ll probably at least ride out the transition to see what happens. JPMorgan is apparently offering insane cash to stay on during the transition, but I’ve never been motivated by gobs of money. My happiness is much more important than buying crap.

One really big problem is the project I’m on is incredibly important to people who need to be employed in the new regime. My project is the biggest ever for my department, has value outside of Bear, and uses advanced technology. There’s a good chance everyone can show off some skills and get a chance to look good to their new masters. It turns out that what my team has built is pretty kick ass by Bear Stearns standards, and that if I were to jet off to my next gig I’d screw over everyone.

That means I’m stuck working for an industry that completely disgusts me with their greed and working on a project that will eventually mean nothing to JPMorgan. The alternative though (leaving) would screw over too many people so I’m there for at least the transition.

I think having people’s jobs depend on my giving a fuck is probably more stressful than being unemployed was. Oh well.

Zapps 0.2 Out

I just put a new release of Zapps for anyone who’s interested in a simple parser. As I mentioned before it’s a simple parser that I forked from Amit Patel’s Yapps2 parser generator. I’ve been slowly adding things I need to it and cleaning up the code. This release adds optional productions to the grammar specification.

Hit the project page for download and bzr instructions.

Idiopidae 0.2: First Official Release

Idiopidae is my little book building tool for programmers. It is similar to noweb and cweb from the TeX world, but it follows the mantra: “code is code; prose is prose”. That means you can document your software projects with Idiopidae without having to do bizarre escaping sequences, copy-pasting code into your documentation, or weird merging. You only have to place consistent include/export comments in your code and your prose, and then Idiopidae figures out how to merge them together.

Big thing that Idiopidae does right now is correctly determine the format of your prose and code, but still allowing you to override the guess. Let’s say you have a bunch of python in a script, but want one section to be in text format, then you can do that. If you also have an HTML document and a LaTeX document that are your prose, then Idiopidae will figure out the right format and inject it correctly. If you don’t like what it decides you just override it.

I’ll next be making it a bit nicer to work with, allow you to set options, and create a simple make-for-python build system for your books. I’m already using it to document various projects into wiki text and HTML formats with LaTeX being worked on.

Check out the project page to download it and read about it. See a sample of Idiopidae documenting itself.